Too quiet on the western front

The conventional wisdom in the capitals of our neighbouring countries is that it is always easier to do business with India’s non-Congress governments. South Asian regimes believe that the Congress, having inherited an imperial attitude towards the neighbours from the British Raj and cultivated a tight-fistedness towards them since Independence, finds it difficult to make major moves towards the neighbours.

That Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has not found time to travel to many of our neighbouring countries over the last four and a half years — he has had one bilateral visit to Kabul and another to Thimpu — would suggest our neighbours may have it right. Particularly perplexing is the prime minister’s reluctance to travel to Pakistan despite repeated invitations from both the military and civilian governments in Islamabad. The contrast with his predecessor

Vajpayee could not be starker.

Vajpayee got onto the first bus to Lahore in February 1999 at a rather short notice. Despite the Kargil war that followed soon after, he invited Pervez Musharraf to visit India. Notwithstanding the failure of the Agra summit in July 2001, the attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001, and the military confrontation that ensued, Vajpayee re-launched diplomacy towards Pakistan in 2003 and travelled to

Islamabad in January 2004 to unveil a new framework for talks.

Thanks to Vajpayee’s relentless efforts, the Congress government inherited a rare positive template to engage Pakistan. Yet, the Manmohan Singh government has few major successes to show and its tenure could end without single prime ministerial visit to Pakistan.

To be sure, the last four and a half years have seen a sustained dialogue between the two nations and an incremental improvement in trade and people-to-people contact. The prime minister has talked about finding an out-of-the-box settlement on Kashmir and launched productive back-channel negotiations with the Musharraf government. The Line of Control has indeed been opened up for trade in goods and movement of people.

Despite such advances, the prime minister has seemed hesitant to take the peace process to its logical conclusion by wrapping up some major agreements that have been in the works for years. Part of the problem has been his ceding a veto to various sections of the security establishment on what are essentially high political decisions. As in the nuclear negotiations with the United States, so in the talks with Pakistan: the prime minister has allowed the bureaucracy to define the terms of engagement from a sectoral rather than a national perspective.

When Musharraf was at his most powerful and in control of the security establishment in Pakistan, our system kept debating whether we could trust and do business with him. Now, despite the many positive overtures from Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari, the argument is about whether he can deliver. If he had allowed the foreign office and security agencies the last word, Vajpayee would never have been able to make any moves towards Pakistan. Given the emotive relationship with Pakistan, our diplomacy must necessarily be driven by the instinct and judgment of the political leadership.

It is true that the prime minister has been ill-served by the do-nothing approach of his key Congress cabinet colleagues in the home and defence ministries who have a major say in the making of Pakistan policy. That, however, does not fully explain Manmohan Singh’s reluctance to get going on Pakistan. The prime minister’s own marker that his visit to Pakistan must have concrete achievements has paradoxically delayed significant outcomes. Bureaucracies deliver only under the pressure of high profile visits and have no incentive to produce results in a purely process driven engagement.

In the end the buck stops at the prime minister. Both the risk and reward of the Pakistan policy belong entirely to him. Just as he stepped forward to salvage the nuclear deal at the very last moment, he must now take the full responsibility for converting the incremental gains in the relationship with Pakistan into a structural change.

India owes the civilian leaders of Pakistan a comprehensive and open-ended engagement whether they can deliver fully or not. Zardari and the former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, the two dominant civilian voices in Pakistan today, have offered a compelling vision of a future relationship with India. While the prime minister has similar ideas on open borders and free trade, he has been either hesitant to articulate them as vigorously or get the bureaucracies moving in that policy direction.

Dr Singh and Sonia Gandhi can help transform India’s external and internal security dynamics if they take a political view of the relationship with Pakistan instead of deferring to self-serving bureaucratic cynicism and the entrenched political pusillanimity in the Congress. An India that makes bold on Pakistan — the first step of which is to set a date for the prime minister’s visit to Pakistan — may also have an unprecedented opportunity to use an Obama administration’s activism as a lever to reorder the long-troubled north-western parts of the Subcontinent.

The writer is a professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

express@expressindia.com