Steady Hand

ON August 28, 1990, Shahid Malik, then political counsellor at the Embassy of Pakistan in Washington wrote to The New York Times, protesting one of its editorials on his country.

ON August 28, 1990, Shahid Malik, then political counsellor at the Embassy of Pakistan in Washington wrote to The New York Times, protesting one of its editorials on his country. Categorically denying the paper8217;s suggestion that the dismissal of the Benazir Bhutto government was made on Pakistan Army orders, he said, 8220;President Ghulam Ishaq Khan acted strictly in accordance with the provisions of the constitutional powers conferred on him. Such changes do not constitute any threat to the democratic setup in the country.8221;

Looking back, it may be unlikely that the career diplomat from Lahore, now Pakistan8217;s new High Commissioner in New Delhi, could have fully realised the depth of change that would sweep through the three themes of his short rebuttal 8212; democracy, constitution, proliferation 8212; over the sixteen years that followed. Malik arrived in Delhi last week on his newest and certainly most prestigious assignment.

Despite a specialisation in Japanese, Malik is ostensibly a connoisseur on the US and India 8212; he was deputy High Commissioner in New Delhi from 1992-95 and on the India Desk in Islamabad. His career record reads like a ceaseless series of plum hops through Tokyo, Rome and Canada and the Pakistan Foreign Ministry, finally resting on the station for which Islamabad invariably and necessarily sends its finest. Yet, diplomatic circles are brisk with talk of the shape of the shoes he now fills, those of Aziz Ahmed Khan, who moves back to Pakistan a year after he 8220;retired8221; in August last, a man who had one of the most crucial tenures of any Pakistani envoy.

Unsurprisingly a Musharraf man with a Masters degree in Economics and a healthy equation with the Pakistan Army, there are those who put Malik8217;s certainly impressive career to his keen ability to work the system he resides in. The extent of Malik8217;s success as something of a perquisite of his being related to two-time former Pakistan President and former chairman of the senate Wasim Sajjad is a matter of speculation, though the circles he has navigated since he joined the Foreign Service in 1972 put it down to a finely honed sense of the 8220;circuit8221;, his easy and warm sociability, and time-tested method of networking 8212; all of this alongside no apparently significant diplomatic accomplishments in a 34-year career.

Yet, unlike Aziz Khan, who as a politically appointed envoy enjoyed a degree of latitude to the extent that he sometimes appeared to externalize himself from the High Commission itself, Malik is known to be less political, certainly less atmospheric than Khan, but at once robustly in tune with the ways of his service 8212; indeed, before his ambassadorship to Canada, he served as a member of the Directing Staff at the Civil Services Academy in Lahore for five years.

What Islamabad calls 8220;out of the box8221; may in some ways have manifested itself in Khan, though with Malik expected to stay the steady course and avoid any dramatic rocking of the boat, there is likely to be less immediate theatre to Indo-Pak diplomacy at least through visible channels.

And considering where relations are now poised, maybe that won8217;t be altogether unwelcome.