The remains of the victory

Fortunately, it is not American persuasion but our own troops who have vacated Pakistan’s most recent aggression. This automatically restricts the scope for any excessive "personal interest" on President Clinton’s part. It alsoreduces the scope for G-8, who entitled their recent resolution not "Kargil" but "Kashmir". The breakthrough achievement of the Shimla Agreement was that, by mutual agreement of both countries, it took the question of J&K out of the domain of international theatre and brought it to the bilateral negotiating table. The pity of it is that we have spent most of the last 27 years not discussing J&K bilaterally while exulting at not having to discuss it at international forums or under the aegis of third-party intervention. This is an untenable posture.

The danger now is of two kinds. One that military victory will tempt us to close the door on talks. If that happens, the opening that Pokharan-II gave the international community, as evidenced in the G-8 resolution of June 1998 followed by the first-ever reference to Kashmir in 33 years in any UN Security Council resolution, could lead to the undermining of the Shimla achievement. The latest G-8 resolution and the US-Pak statement from Blair Ho-use might give ussome cause for instant satisfaction but are seeded with the threat of international intervention if progress in India-Pakistan relations from here on does not accord with their perceptions. The diplomatic tightrope must, therefore, be walked with extreme circumspection.

First and foremost, the government must not listen, or be permitted to listen, to the siren voices of those who argue that, with the international community tilting towards us, the Shimla route of bilateralism be abandoned for us to ride the back of third-party intervention. The international community does not want a war on its hands; it, therefore, dissuades Pakistan from further military misadventure. But the international community does not even begin to understand our point of view on Kashmir. Based, as most member-states of the UN are, on a narrow ethnicity-based definition of nationhood, they do not endorse the plurality of a nation like India whose millennial civilisational basis is unity in diversity. International intervention inour affairs is most likely to send us hurtling the way of Yugoslavia. It must be resisted. If it is not, the balkanisation of India is on the cards.

At the same time, it must be well-appreciated that we cannot revert to the path of no dialogue. At least since Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao’s letter of felicitations to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in October 1993 congratulating her on her election victory and explicitly offering to discuss with Pakistan issues related to J&K, there has been an attempt at dialogue which includes the question of J&K. That dialogue took an age to get underway. But it was just beginning to acquire a measure of seriousness when the publicity hype of the Lahore bus ride robbed the dialogue of its dignity, alarmed those opposed to the processes of reconciliation, and duped the armed forces of both countries into the terrible human losses.

The dialogue needs to be resumed in all seriousness. This requires that the structural defects of the dialogue as at present construed mustfirst be removed. The uncertain, intermittent, fractured, and politically weightless dialogue between foreign secretaries and other secretaries, must be recast as virtually continuous parleys between special envoys of the two sides, integrated in such a way that both intra-sectoral and inter-sectoral trade-offs can be secured through a negotiating process so inured from the inevitable ups-and-downs of the India-Pakistan relationship that it is rendered both uninterrupted and uninterruptable.

Getting such a process meaningfully resumed requires, however, a national consensus behind the negotiators. We did have such a national consensus, whether the government of the day was Congress or non-Congress, till Pokharan-II. The last 14 months have seen that consensus torn, utterly irresponsibly, to shreds. This is what makes a Rajya Sabha session at this juncture imperative. The nation has been through a terrible trauma. Now is the opportunity to unite the nation behind policies that will serve the longer-terminterests of India and the region in which we live. That requires at least enough trust in the democratic process on the part of the caretaker government to summon a Rajya Sabha session in which the nation expresses its common will before it goes into the inevitably divisive process of elections. It will set the parameters within which to conduct the debate at the hustings.

A Rajya Sabha session would also help put matters on hold, both as regards Pakistan as well as the larger international community, until we have a responsible government in office. Clearly, a government that has lost the confidence of the House and the country, even if it has won a war, lacks the authority and legitimacy to enter into long-term international commitments. Therefore, as far as Pakistan and the world are concerned, it would be best for the country to present a united front so that matters are kept on even keel till a popular government, responsible to Parliament and the country, is able to negotiate the narrow straitsbetween the Scylla of bilateral negotiations with Pakistan and the Charbydis of the "personal interest" of third parties. In any case, is it not a matter of national shame that a defeated Nawaz Sharif should hold himself answerable to his Parliament while a victorious Atal Behari Vajpayee shies away from convening the Rajya Sabha?

Aiyar is a Congress party official but these views are his own