Indian Defence Review

When we consider our options, the first reality that we must accept is that we have no option but to deal with Pakistan irrespective of whether we have friendly or inimical relations with it, as it is our direct neighbour.

Some say that we pay excessive attention to Pakistan. At one level this may be true. At SAARC meetings or other forums the intensity of diplomatic attention we give to Pakistan stands out, to the chagrin of other countries in our neighbourhood. At another level, heightened attention is inescapable as our biggest and most intractable problems are with Pakistan.

For many reasons we cannot actually ignore Pakistan even if we wanted to. Those who want India to treat Pakistan with benign neglect miss some important compulsions. Pakistan is determined to confront us bilaterally, regionally and internationally. It inflicts wounds on us, through jihadi terrorism, for instance. The terrorist threat from Pakistan, therefore, becomes prominent in our internal and international discourse.

There is no other country that uses terrorism as an instrument of state policy towards us, or where jihadi groups openly exist and incite hatred towards India. Pakistan plays the religious card against us, targeting not only communal harmony inside India but also our relations with Islamic countries. We have also to be watchful of the rise of religious extremism in Pakistan as it has consequences for our multi-religious society.

Pakistan constantly seeks to internationalize bilateral issues with us, pressing the US and other western powers to intervene, which we have to resist. It raises human rights issues in J&K, and as such issues are sensitive for the international community, we are obliged to counter its propaganda.

Pakistan transfers responsibility for its nuclear ambitions on to our shoulders, creating a linkage between its programme and ours in the minds of other countries, forcing us to enter into the debate on the nuclear threat in the sub-continent.

Even in the case of Afghanistan, it justifies its policies there as necessary to counter India, a line that some in the West buy.

All issues in the forefront of international attention, whether religious extremism, terrorism or nuclear proliferation, figure in the India-Pakistan equation, which makes it impossible for us to behave as if Pakistan is a secondary problem for us.

The relevant question is whether we have dealt with the panoply of threats from Pakistan optimally in terms of available options.

On the face of it, given the lack of success in containing Pakistan one can say that this is not the case. One must, of course, concede that Pakistan is a unique case and no easy answers are available on how it can be successfully dealt with.

Whenever the government’s policy towards Pakistan is criticized, the critics are asked to propose a better policy, one that could have guaranteed, or will guarantee in the future, better results.

This presents a challenge as an alternative agenda of dealing with Pakistan cannot be invented at this stage. The failures of the past weigh on the choices of the present. So much ground has been lost over the years in dealing with Pakistan defensively, inconsistently, wishfully, unrealistically and opportunistically that retrieving it sufficiently is impossible.

The options that we have today are constrained by the options foregone in previous decades.

I would need to make a couple of general points additionally. Some would say that we have exhausted all possible options in dealing with the challenge that we face from Pakistan since 1947. We have fought four wars, if we include Kargil, but the military option has not succeeded in subduing Pakistan.

Pakistan has now developed nuclear capability, which makes the use of any serious conventional military option untenable. Pakistan hyped up our so-called Cold Start doctrine not only to propagate internally and externally that it was Pakistan that was threatened by India rather than the reverse, but also to justify development of tactical nuclear weapons that, in turn, by stoking fears in the international community about a nuclear conflict in the sub-continent, also served Pakistan’s purpose in seeking to extort nuclear concessions of the kind made to India by the US and the NSG.

We have had numerous rounds of dialogue with Pakistan, but without resolution of differences. The Composite Dialogue and the so-called Comprehensive Dialogue that has succeeded it have gone on for years, but they have proved sterile. The dialogue option has not worked either.

We have also rejected dialogue after some particularly intolerable provocation from our neighbour, but that too has not worked to make Pakistan more amenable, as Pakistan sees the dialogue as a platform to keep pressing for concessions from India, not make ones of its own in order to genuinely move forward the process of normalisation.

The biggest problem in our dealing with Pakistan has been our defensive attitude, our unwillingness to retaliate against Pakistan so that a price is imposed on it for its infractions, our reluctance to assume risks accompanying a tougher policy, our concerns about the reaction of the international community if we acted against Pakistan, our fear that if we did that our policy of treating our differences with Pakistan bilaterally would be compromised as the issues would get internationalized.

In recent years we have also not wanted to be at odds with the US on Pakistan in view of US’s military involvement in the region because of Afghanistan.

Beyond all this, Pakistan is a factor in our internal politics, with the political class believing that moderating our approach towards Pakistan, whatever the nature of its provocations, can deliver electoral benefits in view of the weight of our large Muslim population in our highly fractured electoral politics. A softer attitude towards Pakistan is meant to denote a more “secular” and less “anti-Muslim” bias internally.

More recently the view that rising India, on the cusp of becoming a global power, has far too much to lose in getting embroiled in tensions with Pakistan, which has far less to lose as a failing state. India does not want to be distracted from its primary objective of ensuring high economic growth, mobilize foreign direct investment to modernize our infrastructure and alleviate poverty by being involved in any wasteful and self-damaging confrontation with Pakistan.

Pakistan has used the arm of terrorism against us for almost three decades, first in Punjab, then in J&K and subsequently in other parts of India. There is no other instance in international relations of a smaller, weaker country using terrorism as an instrument to settle scores against a larger stronger country. We would be within our right to retaliate, but have not done so, leaving the initiative to Pakistan to calibrate the use of this instrument depending on circumstances of the moment.

Our restraint has not paid us any dividend either with Pakistan or the international community which, aware of Pakistan’s conduct, has chosen to overlook it as India’s high levels of tolerance have not obliged them to confront hard choices on the question.