Opinion PM to PM

On Friday,Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif made some ill-advised,bellicose,Kashmir-related remarks against India in his speech at the UNGA. On Saturday,Prime Minister Manmohan Singh lashed out at Pakistan in his speech. Before they met on Sunday,Sharif reportedly called Singh a “village hag” (sic) off the record and put paid to whatever diplomatic gains he had counted on. After that,the meeting could not be one-on-one.

Back home,the Indo-Pak media war was savage,sharpened by BJP leader Narendra Modi’s explosive reaction to the “village hag” remark. One channel pitted the notoriously visceral Pakistani politician Sheikh Rashid Ahmed against Hindu and Muslim Indians,scoring brownie points while anchors lost their neutral cool.

The New York meeting achieved nothing except a vague agreement on sorting out the recent Line of Control incidents through armies that hate each other. Pakistan’s reference to Indian terrorism in Balochistan was correct but not comparable to India’s globally accepted designation of Pakistan as the epicentre of terrorism,threatening the world,including the US,the EU,India,Russia and China,to say nothing of the Central Asian states,which cower before the Uzbek terrorists trained in Pakistan.

Manmohan Singh’s reaction to an act of terrorism in Jammu on the eve of his meeting with Sharif was brave and statesmanlike,given the negative press he has at home and the populist atmospherics of the coming elections in India. He said he would not be deterred by terrorism while talking peace with Pakistan. While in New York,he met President Barack Obama — who could not find time for his Pakistani counterpart — and agreed to meet Sharif,with caveats against pinning high hopes on the meeting.

Sharif’s reference to Kashmir at the UNGA was aimed more at audiences at home than at India. He also expressed Pakistan’s newfound plaint about the “unjust” global system created by a flawed UN and called,unrealistically,for reforms in the world body. At home,rightwing TV anchors and newspaper reporters were pleased that “he spoke softly but gave a harsh message”. Some were put off because he was not “fiery” enough,meaning that he lacked in denunciatory “Chavizmo” or the parading of a poor man’s useless tumescence in global politics.

Ace anchor Kamran Khan gave the familiar,but repeatedly defeated,spin to the Jammu attack on Indian police and military troops: “The attacks inflicted a heavy loss to the Indian army and police and also revived the assertion that no effort for peace between Pakistan and India could bear fruit until the Kashmir issue was resolved.”

Sharif was toeing the Foreign Office line,which has traditionally toed the Pakistan army line,built on the frozen geopolitical position on India as a permanent enemy opposed to the very existence of Pakistan. The last bit is supported by the textbook brainwash in the schools of Pakistan,particularly Punjab,currently ruled by Sharif’s rightwing PML(N).

His plaint about Kashmir not finding place on the roster of issues at the UN was purely for home consumption,because the 1972 Indo-Pak Simla Agreement had forever assigned it to bilateral dialogue. Pakistan had — wrongly — tried to move the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against India for the 1999 shooting down of a surveillance aircraft. The ICJ,while asserting that it had no jurisdiction over the matter,gratuitously advised Pakistan to abide by the 1972 change of status of all disputes.

One can understand why Sharif took the Foreign Office line. Singh,too,understood it when he plumped for one-on-one talks with Sharif “without the support staff”,although this was not to be. Sharif has gone through this once before with former President Clinton,only to have the then foreign secretary try to change the content of the record of conversation between the two leaders after the meeting. (His latest article described the current session as the “UN carnival”.)

Sharif won his 2013 election pledging trade-based normalisation of relations with India,supported overwhelmingly and unprecedentedly by all the chambers of commerce and industry in the country. His statements on economic and people-to-people contact were so radical that some of his partymen and traditional voters were put off,but he stuck to his guns.

There were other things that Singh must have known,or he would not have put the kind of gloss he did on the Jammu attack: “someone other than Sharif” had done it to prevent an Indo-Pak thaw. The Sharif government and the Pakistan army both denied that they had anything to do with the attacks. While it would normally be incredible that someone could cross the LoC without the Pakistan army knowing,anyone looking closely at Pakistan would have to believe it.

The non-state actors,once called the mujahideen,rebelled against the state after the Pakistan army called off their poxy ihad in Kashmir in 2003-04. Their current “disobedience” resonates with some elements within the deep state as they fulminate against India and attempt infiltration. Retired officers like the former air marshal,Shahid Lateef,can barely contain themselves on TV while castigating India. They care little about the kind of reaction they would draw at the global level.

Both Sharif and Singh are weak at home,but the weakness of Sharif is dangerous: he was ousted from power in 1999,after he tried to normalise relations with India. His successor,Asif Ali Zardari,fell from grace after he defiantly said Pakistan was not threatened by India and tried to renounce his country’s doctrine of nuclear first strike. Singh would recall that Sharif had recently imperilled himself again by saying that Pakistan should withdraw unilaterally from Siachen.

So it would not be wrong on his part to expect Sharif to engage in some “back channel” talk about the real intent of a government trying to rule an internationally isolated country. The pathology of this isolationism is manifested in the “US-Israel-India” key used to explain the Taliban terror in Pakistan: the Peshawar massacre of Christians was staged by the “enemies of Pakistan” (read the hated trio) when they saw that the country was about to talk peace with the Taliban. The latest TV gloss is that the three Peshawar massacres,all within the course of one week,which were attributed to the Taliban,could have been done by India.

Sharif came to power holding two olive branches,one for India,for which he was popularly supported,and the other for the Taliban,which was induced by the sheer helplessness of the state in fighting and defeating terrorism. In a recent TV discussion,a leader belonging to Imran Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf revealed that the army had admitted its inability to defeat the Taliban and had stated that if it ever decided to attack the North Waziristan stronghold of international terrorism,the chances of its winning were only 40 per cent.

Going back to “composite dialogue” would be in order because there is nothing else the two beleaguered prime ministers can do. Let two conservative,hidebound ministries talk till they cause nausea but meanwhile,start unlocking the initiatives on free trade,cross-border investment and travel,pushed aside after the PPP government got into trouble with the army.

Pakistan is nuclearised; Pakistan needs help. It needs help to fight terrorism,not poverty. Ignore its undying suicidal hubris because it is false and induced by fear,not bravado. If it collapses,it will threaten India in ways never imagined before,and it will threaten the world.