Opinion Ceasefire is welcome, but it is also fragile

The reasons for India’s unwillingness to accept any external intercession are complex. It stems from India’s experience with both multilateral and third-party interventions to resolve the Kashmir dispute. Most Indians who pay the slightest heed to international affairs and more specifically the Kashmir dispute, are aware of the partisan role that the US played at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in the wake of the first Kashmir war (1947-48). The United Kingdom had seized the opportunity to inveigle the US into adopting a pro-Pakistan stance at the UNSC. The Harry Truman administration, which was neither especially interested nor particularly well-informed of post-Partition politics of the Subcontinent, had allowed the former colonial power to shape the terms of the debate at the UNSC.

India, which had somewhat naively agreed to refer the dispute to the United Nations on the advice of Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy, quickly discovered that its legalistic arguments about a breach of international peace and security carried little weight. All Indian diplomacy could do was to stall the process until the United Nations lost interest in the subject in the early 1960s.

What is less known, however, is that in the aftermath of the 1962 war, the US and the UK prodded New Delhi to open a set of negotiations with Pakistan. Averell Harriman, a former US ambassador to Moscow and Duncan Sandys, a British member of parliament, and the Commonwealth secretary, came to New Delhi and persuaded an ailing Nehru to initiate these talks. New Delhi agreed to hold these talks but in the end they proved to be quite inconclusive.

Then, in the wake of the 1965 Indo-Pakistani war, both parties, and especially the Lyndon B Johnson administration, lost interest in trying to resolve the Kashmir dispute. The prejudiced milieu of the UNSC and the subsequent Anglo-American pressures to settle the dispute on terms favourable to Pakistan left a lasting imprint on India’s policymakers. Not surprisingly, following the 1971 war with Pakistan, when negotiating the Simla Agreement of 1972, Indian interlocutors were careful to insist that the dispute be resolved on a bilateral basis and without resort to the use of force. However, they left open a loophole when they agreed to accept the phrase “other peaceful means”. Pakistani scholars and diplomats have long insisted that the existence of that phrase leaves open the possibility of the dispute being addressed in multilateral fora. New Delhi, in turn, has categorically rejected that interpretation and has refused to entertain any such prospect.

Even when India was materially a far weaker state, it firmly rejected any effort on the part of Islamabad or any other capital to bring in any third party, let alone the UN to facilitate a possible settlement. Obviously, in a country where views on many politically fraught issues vary widely, there are differing opinions on how best to deal with Pakistan to tackle the Kashmir question. However, few, if any, Indian interlocutors will allow third-party intervention, let alone agree to return to the UN with a view towards solving the issue.

The current ceasefire is fragile. Islamabad, which is using its proxy forces, has inflicted a blow on India. It has punctured the conceit that normalcy had arrived in Kashmir. Furthermore, portraying itself as the victim of Indian aggression, it has apparently convinced the Trump administration that external intercession is necessary to ensure that a conflict spiral that might culminate in a nuclear exchange does not ensue.

The ceasefire simply provides Islamabad a respite. The country is now in hock to the People’s Republic of China, in large part owing to its embrace of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Worse still, through years of economic mismanagement and profligate defence spending, it has now again turned to the International Monetary Fund for another structural adjustment loan. Consequently, it could not indefinitely continue a violent conflict with New Delhi which has the capacity and the will to take on a protracted war.

Yet, the anaemic government of Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, like so many of its civilian predecessors, exists at the sufferance of the all-powerful military establishment. More to the point, the current chief of army staff, General Asim Munir, is known for his visceral hostility toward India. Consequently, if he, or anyone of his disposition, is in office, the intransigence toward India will not dissipate. The ceasefire, obviously, is a welcome development. However, it is hardly a significant step toward the resolution of the conflict that has dogged both states since their inception in 1947.

The writer is a Senior Fellow and directs the Huntington Programme on US-India Relations at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University