Pre-emptive deadlock on Kashmir

When Kargil got too hot to handle it was the Pakistani Prime Minister who ran to Washington to seek intervention and it was, please remember, because Bill Clinton intervened that Pakistan pulled its ‘‘Kashmiri freedom fighters’’ back to its side of the border. So, de facto, there is already international mediation and, inevitably, when there is only one superpower left it is to this superpower that we turn. This bothers us in India because anti-Americanism is an old national characteristic.

An intriguing aspect of the letters that jammed my mailbox was that the one thing they had in common was virulent anti-Americanism. This stemmed not just from the conviction that America would always side with Pakistan but from that old mistrust so carefully nurtured in those long Cold War years when India was a non-aligned Soviet satellite. Our dislike for America was always paradoxical because it was laced with deepest admiration. Although we were on the side of the Soviet Union we resented our leaders making that country our role model. Our socialist, secular republic was a shabby country that made shabby goods that nobody wanted to buy so we bartered them for shabby Soviet armaments and longed secretly for the American way of life. No sooner did Dr. Manmohan Singh lift the controls slightly than we turned joyously towards America, embracing Mcdonalds and Pizza Hut and exporting our computer software and garments. The process of economic liberalisation may be slow but India has changed beyond recognition in the past ten years. So, we should be able to shake off the ideological dilemmas of our socialist past but, perhaps because our politicos, officials and intellectuals continue to be of largely Leftist persuasion, we remain stuck in a Cold War mindset in matters of foreign policy.

Jaswant Singh tried to take a new road, based on national interest and not ideology, but no sooner did he move to Finance than the MEA appears to have reverted back to the anti-Americanism of our socialist days. The most embarrassing consequence of this was that resolution condemning the war on Iraq that Parliament passed even as Iraqis were smashing Saddam Hussein’s statues and dancing in the streets of Baghdad. The Iraqi dictator appears to have more admirers in India than his own country or we should have seen some signs of protest. If even 20,000 of Baghdad’s citizens had come into the streets to stop the American tanks the war could have had a different ending.

The world has changed unimaginably since September 11, and it is by recognising, and using to our advantage, the changed geo-political realities that we need to look for a resolution of the Kashmir dispute. We could begin by accepting that the problem is no longer one that can be solved domestically by the Prime Minister making a flying visit or sending yet another interlocutor to talk to the militant groups. Judging by their reactions to the Prime Minister’s visit it is clear that they speak for Pakistan anyway so is there any point in talking to them while refusing to talk to their masters in Islamabad? The Vajpayee government made two sincere, valiant efforts to persuade Pakistan’s military dictator that India wanted peace. It failed in Lahore and it failed again in Agra. That should be good enough reason for us to accept that we need to find a new way to talk to each other. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister would do well to order his ministers to refrain from making any more foolish foreign policy statements.

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