Modi and Pakistan

Some people in Pakistan and Kashmir believe that a right-wing government in power in New Delhi would be better placed to resolve the India-Pakistan conflict. The logic is that when a centre-left party is in power, it is not allowed to take bold steps for conflict resolution that require give and take. When right-wing parties come to power, however, they tend to moderate themselves.

Modi gave the right signal by inviting neighbouring heads of state and government to his swearing-in, yet I don’t buy into this theory. Does history bear this out? Atal Behari Vajpayee was the first BJP prime minister of India. What was the track record of peace-making from 1998 to 2004?

One of the first things the Vajpayee government did was to conduct nuclear tests. As the world reprimanded India, Pakistan followed up with tests of its own. Is getting nuclear weapons a sign of moderation and peace-making? There seems to be a consensus that nuclear weapons act as mutual deterrent and thus prevent war. The Kargil war — not officially called a war by either country but that is what it was — was the first and only direct conventional war between countries possessing nuclear warheads. (Indians, of course, argue that Pakistan had nuclear weapons even before.)

Vajpayee took a bus to Lahore, signed the Lahore Declaration with Nawaz Sharif. Like every Indian and Pakistani premier ever, Vajpayee dreamt of making peace with Pakistan. A lot of people thought he wants to win the Nobel peace prize. Yet, to take a bus to Lahore (February 1999) and not anticipate Kargil (May 1999), is bad peace-making. It was criticised heavily as an ‘intelligence failure’ but it was also a political failure, one that the Congress would have got a lot of flak for if it had been committed by them.

Then there was the militant attack on the Indian parliament in 2001, which India blamed on Pakistan. The BJP-led government’s response was to move forces to the border, keep them there, not go to war, not talk to Pakistan — a strange kind of logjam. Hundreds of Indian soldiers died laying mines. Vajpayee’s policy on Pakistan oscillated between extremes.

The point here is not to undermine Vajpayee’s legacy, because his heart was in the right place, but just to say that there is no given causation between a right-wing government and solving international conflicts. If a right-wing government is capable of moderation, it is also capable of going to the other extreme — after all, there’s always the next election to be contested.

Vajpayee reportedly wanted Narendra Modi to step down as Gujarat chief minister after the violence there in 2002. General (retd) Musharraf raised the Gujarat violence at the United Nations, thus helping make Pakistan an issue in the Gujarat legislative assembly elections. Modi kept talking about ‘Mian Musharraf’. Internal events of either country, regardless of who is in power, also impact the state of bilateral relations.

What is clear, however, is that solving conflict requires a stable and powerful government on both sides. A weak government, one whose own decision-making abilities are blocked by the opposition, media, coalition allies, judiciary or army, will not be able to take bold leaps for conflict-resolution. In both countries, a popular, independent and strong leader would need to be in power for two to tango. To that extent, it does not matter whether the government in power is leftist or rightist — since both want to make peace with neighbours anyway. Perhaps, what is more important than who is in power is the internal political dynamic within either country.

A large chunk of the opposition to Manmohan Singh’s ambitions to make peace with Pakistan came from his own party, internally, and yet he did a lot. The best and only workable road map for peace was evolved by Manmohan Singh and General Musharraf, known as the four-point formula. Dr Singh’s special envoy for Pakistan, Satinder K Lambah, recently said in Srinagar that whenever India and Pakistan resolve their conflict, it will have to be the four-point formula. There is no other way.

The idea that there needs to be a right-wing government in power in Delhi to resolve neighbourhood conflicts irritates me just the way many Pakistanis are irritated to hear from Indians how General Musharraf was a great guy. If a military ruler was such a good idea, Pakistani liberals respond, why doesn’t India also get a military ruler?

Musharraf did Kargil and slighted Vajpayee and snubbed India many times. Why, then, were so many in India fond of him? It was the same argument: the military needs to be directly in power for India to resolve the conflict. Did that happen? It did not happen for the simple reason that even a military ruler faces internal political dynamics, as Musharraf did, leading to his exit.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 6^th, 2014.

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