Indian Defence Review

We have shown restraint in reacting to Pakistan’s constant tirades against us in international forums, its use of Islamic platforms against us, its constant attempts to internationalize the Kashmir issue and the like, but this has not deterred Pakistan’s aggressive and antipathetic conduct.

Pakistan remains a perennial problem for us. It is a unique situation in which the animosity of sixty-five years has not been overcome despite vast changes in the international arena, with former implacable adversaries like the US and Russia moving, despite serious differences, towards fundamental reconciliation.

The fundamental problem is the unchanged mind-set of the ruling Pakistani elite towards India. The basic antipathy, distrust and sense of rivalry towards India conditions Pakistan’s policies towards us. The Islamic roots of Pakistan and differences with India rooted in religious ideology remain a huge obstacle. If Pakistan’s hostility is anchored in the “idea” of Pakistan, unless that “idea” evolves, burying of differences will not be possible.

The Pakistani mind-set has an organic linkage with the military’s domination of Pakistan’s polity. The Pakistani armed forces provide the physical and moral muscle to confront India. With Pakistan becoming nuclear, its capacity to confront India, despite other weaknesses of the country, can be sustained longer than might have been the case otherwise.

An important caveat would be that while the Pakistan armed forces are at the core of the country’s confrontationist policies towards us, the civilian class too has deep anti-Indian feelings.

Let us remember that Pakistan was created not by the Pakistani military but by its political class. The political sentiments rooted in the two-nation theory have not disappeared even if a section of the Pakistani polity can have a more pragmatic and cooperative view of relations with India.

India has been unable to craft a policy that through threats of retaliation, engagement and deterrence moves the relationship towards a form of normalization. In the last decade India has given priority to dialogue, overlooking serious Pakistani provocations, but without the expected results.

On the central issue of terrorism India has played for time, hoping that at some stage the problem may go away or become more manageable.

We may be reasoning that the most practical way to handle this highly complicated issue would be to strengthen our defences on the border as well as internally against terrorist attacks and simultaneously engage Pakistan in a dialogue, however frustrating, taking at face value the well-rehearsed postures of the Pakistani leadership on their sincerity in combating terrorism, which they project as a common threat.

While we have strengthened border defences, our homeland security steps have been quite inadequate. We are unable to forge an appropriately stringent anti-terrorism law, the proposal to set up an anti-terrorism body at the central level with the required authority has run into issues of state-centre rights under the constitution, while the number of personnel, the training and equipment required for securing our society remain inadequate.

I mentioned how past concessions have eroded our capacity to deal with firmness the challenges that continue. Let me take the last decade for examination.

In 2004 Pakistan committed itself to not allow terrorist attacks against India from territory under its control. In exchange, India agreed to restore the Composite Dialogue. A clear linkage was established between dialogue and terrorism. But we discarded this linkage later by continuing our dialogue despite a series of Pakistani abetted terrorist attacks against our people in city streets, religious places, economic targets and our science and technology centres, whether in Delhi, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Benares or Mumbai.

Instead of interrupting the dialogue, India played along with the fiction that these attacks were by actors outside the control of the Pakistani government and therefore breaking the dialogue at the governmental level would not be justified.

We reinforced the perception that we had no choice but to tolerate these provocations by stating at the highest political level that there was no alternative to a dialogue. Our only mild remonstration, repeated periodically with no effect, was that terrorism had to be reined it to create conditions for a fruitful dialogue and build trust between the two countries.

We agreed to formally delink dialogue and terrorism by proclaiming in a joint statement with Pakistan at Sharm el Sheikh in July 2009 that action on terrorism should not be linked to the Composite Dialogue process and these two should not be bracketed.

This concession came a few months after the monstrous terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November 2008, exhibiting once again our anxiety to talk to Pakistan. The consideration that the absence of a dialogue only invited pressure from outside- the US quite clearly- may have weighed with us, but if we thought that a chastened Pakistan confronted with rising domestic terrorism might actually have begun to see the issue differently, then we were wrong in our analysis.

If the assumption was that this delinking would give the Pakistan government political space to try those responsible for the Mumbai massacre as a first step towards the elimination of terrorism from its soil directed at India, then that assumption too has proved a mistaken one.

Pakistan has in fact used the mounting challenge of domestic terrorism to argue that it had no reason to abet terrorism outside and that domestic Indian groups were responsible for terrorist attacks within the country.

It has exploited every procedural legal trick to delay the trial of those responsible for the Mumbai attack.

Worse, the former Pakistani interior minister on a visit to India in December 2012 bracketed the Mumbai attack with Babri Masjid and imputed it to the handiwork of an Indian intelligence contact and non-state actors in Pakistan and India acting in league with a US national. He was conveying the “truth” to the Indian public hidden by the Indian government, he said. By arguing that our agencies had failed to prevent the Mumbai attack, he revealed how far Pakistan can go to reject any guilt for state-promoted terrorism and how much the sense of being a victim of conspiracies has got ingrained into Pakistani thinking.

The hypocrisy of the government of Pakistan is such that it has failed not only to dismantle the structures of terrorism on its territory by disbanding the terrorist groups and their training camps, it has singularly failed to put curbs on Hafiz Saeed, the master-mind of the Mumbai attacks, whom it allows to continue spouting venom against India.

By conceding that the main threat to both countries is terrorism and that both would cooperate with each other to fight it, India has absolved the Pakistani government of any complicity with terrorist groups.

We have allowed Pakistan to put us on the defensive on the terrorism issue by agreeing to be answerable to Pakistan for the Samjhauta Express attack in our joint documents. We have accepted the bracketing together of a single incident, however reprehensible, with sustained attacks over years by Pakistan based terrorists in India.

The statements by our own Home Ministers about “saffron” terror, BJP run training camps and the internal threat from the Indian Mujaheddin being more important than external threats, have severely damaged our case against Pakistan by handing it propaganda fodder against us.

The CBI-IB wrangle over the Ishrat Jehan incident is now feeding the Pakistani propaganda machine on 26/11, a clear case where domestic political battles are being fought unmindful of the deleterious consequences for our foreign policy interests.

While we claim that we have sovereignty over the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir, our policies have contradicted that position.

In 2009 we seem to have agreed through the back-channel on a four-point solution which in fact conceded to Pakistan the right to determine our sovereign decisions on the quantum of autonomy we would give to J&K and the extent of demilitarization on our side. Some mechanisms to exercise joint oversight, if not sovereignty, over some aspects pertaining to the whole state were also agreed to, besides opening of trade and people’s movement across the LOC.

General Musharraf’s mounting internal problems that led ultimately to his eviction from the presidency apparently prevented the finalization of this agreement. The argument that there was corresponding flexibility by Pakistan is not convincing because the situation on both sides is altogether different. J&K has autonomy that POK does not have. POK is integrated with Pakistan, with profound demographic changes there since 1947. Most importantly, there is no separatist movement in POK.

The opening of the LOC in J&K to allow movement of people and trade reflected the weakness of the Indian hand.

The view that borders cannot be changed but can be made irrelevant has meaning only in a situation where recognized borders exist and not in the case of disputed borders as in J&K.

We took this decision to encourage linkages between J&K and POK to satisfy mainstream political parties in J&K and blunt the platform of the secessionists who either advocate a role for Pakistan in resolving our internal difficulties in J&K or lean politically towards it.

Our unwillingness to prevent the Pakistani leaders and bureaucrats to meet secessionist leaders in New Delhi and Islamabad also indicates the soft core of our policies on J&K. If we could have defeated Pakistan and the secessionists by giving them such political space one could have lauded the astuteness of this approach, but that has not happened.