As the Indian and Pakistani foreign secretaries sit down across the table in New Delhis Hyderabad House today,they will not miss an irony that envelops their talks the intense local and global media attention on their meeting is in inverse proportion to the amount of political communication between the power centres in the two capitals during the recent months.
The lack of a political agreement,or more correctly the collapse of the earlier understandings between Delhi and Islamabad on how to manage the bilateral relationship,means the task of the two top diplomats would be a limited one.
At the formal level,the mandate of Nirupama Rao and Salman Bashir would be to convey their respective expectations and conditions for resuming bilateral negotiations and finding if there is common ground,at least a bit of it.
On the basis of what we have heard so far since the foreign secretary talks were announced,there is little to suggest that Delhi and Islamabad can find a way to resume the substantive negotiations that were suspended in the wake of the November 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai.
For India,one of the core premises under which it negotiated with Pakistan since January 2004 has collapsed. It was the promise of the then president of Pakistan and army chief,General Pervez Musharraf,to control the sources of anti-India violence based in Pakistan in order to facilitate a dialogue that would address all bilateral disputes,including Jammu and Kashmir.
Although India was not always happy with the way Musharraf kept his word,the graph of violence during 2004-07 was largely beneath the threshold of Indian tolerance with an occasional spike. As a consequence much progress was made during 2004-07 on all aspects of the bilateral relationship. Indias talks with Pakistan on Kashmir through the back channel resulted in a variety of confidence-building measures as well as a significant draft framework for settling the issue.
Musharrafs hold on Pakistan,however,began to weaken from 2007 and he was succeeded as army chief by General Ashfaq Pervaiz Kayani at the end of that year. As real power flowed to the new general,it was quite evident that Kayani did not believe he was bound by Musharrafs commitments on controlling cross-border violence. If there was any doubt on this score,they were dispelled by the attack on the Indian embassy on Kabul in July 2008 and the Mumbai aggression in November 2008.
As Delhi suspended the peace process after the Mumbai attack,Islamabad insisted that India could not make terror-free atmosphere a precondition for the talks. India has now invited the Pakistan foreign secretary to Delhi to see if there is a way the old understanding on the relationship between violence and talks can be reconstructed.
This objective was reaffirmed at the highest level in Delhi this week when President Pratibha Patil told Parliament that her government is ready for a meaningful relationship with Pakistan if Islamabad seriously addresses Indias concerns on terrorism.
Delhi surely knows that Foreign Secretary Bashir is not in a position to give credible commitments that Pakistan will end its support to groups on the warpath against India. Let alone controlling the Lashkar-e-Toiba,the Pakistan armys main instrument for violence against India,Islamabad has loosened the restrictions on its public activity in recent weeks.
There is worse still. The Pakistan army has good reasons to believe the regional balance of power has begun to shift definitively in its favour for the first time since September 2001.
The Pakistan armys GHQ in Rawalpindi assesses,rightly,that the United States and the international community are tired of their unsuccessful occupation of Afghanistan after 9/11 and eager to find a way out by negotiating a political reconciliation with the Taliban.
General Kayani has offered to broker such a deal with the Taliban,and in return for ending the international coalitions misery in Afghanistan,he wants to collect big from Washington.
Kayanis improved leverage in Washington has translated into a long list of demands; the Obama administrations eagerness to buy Kayanis love does not mean the focus in the coming months will all be on Kashmir.
While Islamabads rhetoric on Kashmir is getting sharper,Kayani knows Washington cannot deliver India on Kashmir. His immediate priorities are different. One is about ensuring Pakistans primacy in the new political arrangements being contemplated for Afghanistan.
The other is to compel Washington to reverse what Kayani considers the military and nuclear imbalances that have emerged between Pakistan and India during the last decade. What Kayani wants is the US transfer of advanced conventional weapons and a civilian nuclear deal similar to that India got from President George W. Bush.
A measure of controlled tension with India is the key to Kayanis ambitions at home,in Afghanistan and Washington. A predictable India would make it easier for Kayani by persisting with its old framework of talking to Pakistan one day and refusing to engage the next.
Delhi,however,must find ways to surprise the Pakistan army by being unpredictable. This would necessarily involve strategic patience and tactical flexibility.
On the strategic front,Indias challenge is to limit the Pakistan armys recent political gains at home and abroad. On the tactical side,of which todays talks are but a step,Delhis message must be two-fold.
To the weak civilian masters of Foreign Secretary Bashir,India must reaffirm commitment to do business with them. Delhi must also caution the Pakistan army,which surely has vetted Bashirs brief,to mind the gap between its boundless ambition and limited grasp and that India is prepared to deal with the Pakistan armys habit of over-reach.
The writer is Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress,Washington DC
express@expressindia.com
