| 04 January 2004 | Sunday | 11 Ziqa'ad 1424 |
Let it be a fair deal for all
I referred, albeit, peripherally to two meetings between Indian and Pakistani heads of government last Sunday. I propose to say more about these and some of the other Indo-Pakistan "summit meetings" today.
Liaquat Ali Khan met Jawaharlal Nehru in Delhi on April 8, 1950. They discussed and signed a document, which came to be known as the "Liaquat-Nehru Pact," that committed their governments to preserve the right of minorities in their two countries to equal protection of the law. Nothing else that might have been newsworthy was said or done at this time.
Nehru came to Pakistan in 1960 to sign the Indus Waters Treaty, stayed four days (September 19-23), visited Karachi, Rawalpindi, and Lahore. Ayub Khan took him to Murree, had long walks with him, gave him roses, but his efforts to discuss Kashmir with the Indian prime minister got nowhere.
Assisted by Z.A. Bhutto, Aziz Ahmad, Asghar Khan and others, Ayub Khan conferred with the Indian prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, and his delegation at Tashkent in the first week of January 1966 to settle the preceding war and make peace. The Soviet leaders, who had sponsored the meeting, were present on the scene in full force. Pakistan wanted the peace agreement to include some Indian concessions on Kashmir. This the Indians declined to do.
The Soviet leaders had gone out of their way to ingratiate Ayub Khan. Marshals Zhukov, Malinovsky, Sokolovsky, and other Soviet officers clicked their heels and saluted each time he walked into, or out of, a conference room or reception hall. After four days of deadlock the Soviets intervened. They conveyed it to Ayub Khan that failure of the conference to produce an agreement would embarrass them, because it would also be seen as their failure.
Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, told Bhutto that Pakistan should not expect to gain at the conference table what it had failed to achieve on the field of battle. Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin advised Ayub Khan to be content with peace on the basis of a return to positions the two sides had held before August 5, l965. He accepted this advice; overruling Bhutto and Aziz Ahmad, who wanted to return home without an agreement, and signed one that said nothing about Kashmir except that the two sides had stated their respective positions on the subject.
At Simla (June 28-July 3, 1972) the Indians called upon Pakistan to recognize Bangladesh forthwith, and accept the new ceasefire line in Kashmir, now called the "line of control," as a permanent border between the two countries. The Pakistani team wanted to get back its prisoners of war (some 93,000 of them) and the territory that India had seized (5139 square miles, of which more than 500 square miles lay in the densely populated areas of Punjab). It did not want to discuss Kashmir and, in any case, it rejected the Indian proposal. The conference reached an impasse.
Seven draft agreements were exchanged but to no avail. Bhutto directed Aziz Ahmad to let it be known at the eighth round that the Pakistani delegation intended to return home that evening. And then came his famous "tea" with Mrs Gandhi at 5.00 p.m. on July 2 in her room with nobody else present. The exchange that took place here saved the conference. The two delegations were ordered back to the table after dinner, and hectic talks ensued. Mrs Gandhi and Mr Bhutto, installed in separate rooms on each side of the conference hall, instructed their respective negotiators, as need arose, over the next several hours. An agreement was sealed and signed shortly after midnight on July 3.
The Indian insistence regarding Bangladesh and Kashmir was dropped, and Pakistani concerns about the return of its POWs and territory were substantially accommodated. The new line of control in Kashmir was not to be disturbed by either side by force. It was agreed also that issues, or disputes, between the two countries would be settled through bilateral negotiations and (as Mrs Gandhi understood and intended it to mean) without resort to third parties or international agencies.
We don't know what exactly transpired during Mr Bhutto's private conversation with Mrs Gandhi. But it is not unreasonable to assume that he made a convincing case along the following lines: (1) given India's military preponderance, Pakistan had no option but to be peaceable; (2) the Pakistani people, at that point in time, would simply not accept the LoC as an international border or agree to the recognition of Bangladesh; (3) if he accepted the Indian demands in these respects, he would be repudiated at home and ousted from power, probably, by the generals who might be more difficult for India to deal with.
Mrs Gandhi understood a fellow-politician's problems of survival and relented. Even so, she chose to be cautious: she would return the Pakistani territory right away but keep the prisoners for a time to see how Bhutto spoke and acted in the following months.
It seems that both at Tashkent and Simla the personal factor influenced the outcome of negotiations. Ayub Khan yielded not because of compelling circumstances but because, intimidated by the Soviet rulers, he lost his nerve; because, as Herbert Feldman once put it, "the fibre of the man did not correspond to the manner of his address and was unequal to the necessities of his mission."
The Indo-Pakistan war of 1965 had ended in a stalemate, but Pakistan had come out of the 1971 war clearly as the vanquished party. Yet Bhutto did better than Ayub Khan had done, for he was not only eloquent and articulate but an astute politician, adroit, crafty, wilful, persevering, and capable of defiance. Above all, he had massive political support at home, an advantage Ayub Khan never had.
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi met Benazir Bhutto on the "sidelines" of a Saarc meeting in Islamabad in December 1988, and again a few months later (July 16, 1989). The two prime ministers had meetings with their respective delegations in attendance, but they also had a brief private, one-to-one, meeting. Nothing came out of their meetings beyond routine assertions of sovereignty and equality, commitment to non-intervention in each other's internal affairs, resolve to settle disputes by peaceful means, and respect for the UN charter. Ms Bhutto was more at the giving than the receiving end.
At a dinner for Rajiv Gandhi, she saluted his "illustrious grandfather" (the late Mr Nehru) and his mother (Indira Gandhi). She urged strict adherence to the "letter and spirit" of the Simla agreement. She would support moves to keep each side from attacking the other's nuclear installations. Nothing was said or done about Kashmir and, in fact, at a joint press conference before his return to Delhi, the Indian prime minister rudely brushed aside questions on the subject.
Nawaz Sharif and Atal Behari Vajpayee met in September 1998 in New York where they had gone for the annual UN General Assembly meeting. Their foreign secretaries issued a joint statement on September 23 indicating the two governments' intention to initiate a "composite dialogue," meaning that several committees, each consisting of relevant secretaries, would begin discussing issues. Thus, the two foreign secretaries would discuss Kashmir; the defence secretaries would discuss Siachen; terrorism and drug trafficking would be taken up by the home/interior secretaries; trade by the commerce secretaries, and so forth.
In the following February, Mr Vajpayee made his famous bus trip to Lahore. He stayed two days in the city, and it seems that his talks with Mr Nawaz Sharif went well. They agreed that their foreign ministers would meet periodically, coordinate positions to be taken on issues relating to WTO, increase cooperation in the area of information technology, and liberalize travel between the two countries.
The "Lahore Declaration" (February 21, 1999) recognized that resolution of disputes, including the one relating to Kashmir, was essential to the maintenance of peace between them. The two governments agreed also to guard against accidental use of nuclear weapons, promote CBMs, combat terrorism, and protect human rights.
Reports attributed to Mr Niaz Naik, Pakistan's high commissioner in Delhi at the time, have it that he began secret negotiations concerning Kashmir with Mr B.K. Mishra, a confidante of Vajpayee, within days of the Indian prime minister's return from Lahore. These talks (March 3-June 27) went well but were called off abruptly when the Pakistan army began its operations in Kargil.
We all know that the Agra summit (July 14-16, 2001) did nothing to improve Indo-Pakistan relations. Two days of continuous talks between their delegations, and more than six hours of General Musharraf's private, one-to-one, discussions with Prime Minister Vajpayee, in five rounds, failed to produce even a ceremonial joint statement at the end.
I am inclined to think that personal qualifications of the principal actors may have, once again, impacted the talks at Islamabad, New York/Lahore, and Agra. Ms Bhutto-young, inexperienced, and vulnerable - may have been overawed by Rajiv Gandhi's antecedents and current position. Nawaz Sharif did not score high marks for intellectual sophistication, but his very simplicity may have inspired confidence and mellowed Vajpayee. Moreover, unlike Ms Bhutto in 1988 and 1989, Mr Sharif in 1999 commanded a huge majority in the National Assembly.
General Musharraf at Agra had taken upon himself the task of a politician without having the skills of one. The bluntness of speech for which flatterers praise him may have alienated his hosts to a point where they became loath to do business with him. This is evident from the fact that even now, almost a year and a half after the event, Mr Vajpayee is not exactly enthusiastic about having another encounter with him.
At none of the Indo-Pakistan summit meetings was any real progress made towards resolving the Kashmir dispute. Our experience as well as that of many other nations suggests that summit meetings are not the proper forums for settling intractable issues. They should be called to confirm agreements that officials at lower levels have already worked out. A few rough edges might be smoothed out at the summit but not much more.
The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA.
E-mail: anwarsyed@cox.net
Let it be a fair deal for all
A year-long campaign to restore sovereignty to the parliament has ended in the parliament rubberstamping a deal made in party caucuses and in brokering cabals. Keeping the constitutional propriety or political quibbling aside, the Musharraf presidency now assuredly carries the imprimatur of Pakistan's clerics and divines.
When the fight was all for the supremacy of the parliament, the parties to the agreement - the president, the Q League and the MMA religious alliance - for the sake of form alone should have given the National Assembly and Senate a few weeks to discuss and hold public hearings on the amended Legal Framework Order now made a part of the Constitution. Besides the form of it, some useful ideas or suggestions could have emerged from the debate in the two chambers and from the deposition of public witnesses. But that was not to be this time round as it has not been in the past.
The parliament in Pakistan is required only to approve, and not make, laws and constitutional amendments agreed among the power brokers outside the parliament. The fiery rhetoric is all for the parliament but every action tends to undermine its authority. Whatever good or bad may flow from the Q League-MMA agreement approved by the president it would not enhance either the role or the prestige of the present parliament. That, it now appears, was never the objective.
The extra-constitutional manoeuvres culminating in amendments to the Constitution and election of the president through specially devised rules and procedures have had the effect of further weakening the political parties already divided into many factions. In turn the elective offices and institutions are also bound to suffer the loss of authority and image both for they are sustained only by united parties committed to programmes. Some instant defections have borne that out. The voting pattern suggests more will follow.
Emerging diminished and bruised from the process is the autonomy of the provinces, that is whatever little of it they possessed under the unamended Constitution. The MMA negotiators fought all the way against extension in the retirement age of the judges but readily agreed to the federal control over the local government laws and institutions which lie purely in the provincial domain.
In fact the rights and aspirations of the provinces found little place in the constitutional scheme even before the LFO. The allocation of subjects and revenues in the schedules of the Constitution makes the provinces subordinate to the central authority and not equal partners in the federation. The disaffection in the provinces on this treatment, more pronounced in Balochistan and Sindh is bound to grow on this latest federal incursion in their jurisdiction.
Before issuing the LFO in August 2002, General Musharraf held many sessions to ascertain the views of the various professions and sections of society on his favourite theme of checks and balances to prevent the concentration of authority in one individual (more specifically the prime minister) or branch of government. The thrust of those discussions remained on the setup at the centre. The imbalance of power between the federation and the provinces which in the long run constitutes a bigger threat to a stable political order received little attention.
That imbalance could have been rectified by transferring some subjects from the federation to the provinces and the provincial governments in turn transferring some of their functions of local nature to the districts and tiers below. Instead the federal government chose to take over some of the provincial functions and passed down some others to the district governments. This has aggravated the imbalance and, in addition, created friction and rivalries within the provincial government.
The president and the federal government now have to pay back the debt they owe to the MMA for providing them a constitutional cover howsoever ingeniously rigged or tenuous it might be, the prime minister has already so promised. At the same time Pakistan stands internationally committed to fight extremism at home, terrorism in Afghanistan and check more rigorously the movement of armed volunteers across the Line of Control into the Indian- held Kashmir as a necessary step for the normalization of relations with India. It is not an international commitment alone, it is also a national compulsion for peace and progress.
The MMA despite its political support to the president would not stand behind him in pursuing these objectives. In fact its declared stance is to the contrary. The ARD though agreeing with the objectives would not support the government because of the increasing stress and frustration to which the parties constituting the backbone of the Alliance have been subjected all along. The personal and factional interests, thus, have confronted the country with a bizarre situation in which those who endorse the policies of the government are its enemies and those who oppose its policies are, in a manner of speaking, its friends.
The government needs to broaden the base of its support by extending a fair deal to the exponents of provincial rights who prefer to call themselves nationalists. They are more numerous and influential in the three smaller provinces than their numbers in the national or provincial legislatures suggest because they are unable ever to forge an electoral alliance. They are found as much in the ruling coalition as they are in the other parties or just sulk in isolation. Their loyalty to the recognition of the political and cultural identity of the provinces cuts across the party lines. The common strand in them all would be complete agreement with the current national agenda on extremism and terror at home and in Afghanistan and on building bridges with India.
The other gains in winning over the "nationalists" would be more competent governments in the three smaller provinces and opening of new areas to oil and gas exploration in Balochistan. All that is said here may not materialize but it is worth trying. Every man in his time plays many parts. The nationalist may have to play his best part in the present time.