DESPITE the claim that the second round of the composite dialogue has been completed with “some positive developments”, there is widespread disappointment that the Indo-Pakistan dialogue process has so far failed to achieve tangible progress on any of the substantive issues bedevilling bilateral relations.

It is, however, gratifying that the recently held foreign secretary-level talks have ended on a pleasant and promising note. Islamabad and New Delhi have resolved to take their bilateral relations forward and implement some more confidence-building measures (CBMs) such as opening more bus routes, upgradation of hotlines and an agreement on an MoU on pre-notification of missile testing to be signed next month.

The two foreign secretaries, apart from preparing for the October meeting between the foreign ministers of Pakistan and India, also discussed the forthcoming meeting in New York between President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In the words of the Indian foreign secretary, his Islamabad visit “has enabled us to set the stage for what we hope will be a very constructive and also a very productive meeting between the president of Pakistan and the prime minister of India”.

According to the roadmap agreed upon by the two sides, the foreign secretaries will meet in January 2006 in New Delhi to launch the next round of the composite dialogue. Meetings on all other subjects would be held between January and July 2006, but technical-level meetings would be concluded by April 2006.

Since the foreign secretary-level talks in Islamabad, there has been a land-mark meeting between the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) and the Indian prime minister, assisted by his top advisers. The APHC leaders have promised to put forward a plan for a step-by-step resolution of the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir. New Delhi seems to have realized that standing still on Kashmir and doing nothing is not a viable political option.

The resumption of talks with the APHC leaders, about a week before the New York meeting on September 14 between the Pakistan president and the Indian prime minister, is a significant development. The focus during the talks was on India’s assurance that if violence and infiltration levels across the Line of Control came down, New Delhi could consider a reduction in troops in the region. Also, there would be a time-bound review of all detentions in Jammu and Kashmir. It may be added that President Musharraf had on several occasions emphasized that an end to human rights violations and withdrawal of troops from the urban centres in Indian-held Kashmir would help a great deal in raising the confidence level of the Kashmiri people.

India-Pakistan relations have a history of moving from crisis to detente and then back again. The chief reason for this has been that both the neighbours are so suspicious and mistrustful of each other that even when they reach some agreement, a very rare occurrence, its provisions are interpreted so differently by the two sides that the agreement itself dies in the process. This has happened in the case of Siachen. Sixteen years ago, the defence secretaries of India and Pakistan were able to hammer out an agreement on Siachen, but different interpretations of the agreement over the years has strangled it.

Lack of progress on Siachen has been the most noticeable failure of the composite dialogue. And this has happened despite the commitment of the top leadership of both Pakistan and India to Siachen’s demilitarization. This naturally makes one wonder that if New Delhi and Islamabad cannot even agree to implement a 16-year old agreement to withdraw their forces from the forbidding and strategically unimportant 6,300-metre high glacier, where more soldiers have died from the bitter cold than by shooting at each other, can they reasonably hope to resolve far more complicated and sensitive issues like Kashmir, Wullar Barrage and the like.

There is no question that the issues between India and Pakistan are complex and carry with them a heavy burden of history. That is one of the reasons that after almost two years of bilateral talks no perceptible progress has been made on issues that really matter — Siachen, Wullar Barrage/Turbul navigation project, Sir Creek and, of course, Kashmir. But there is another impediment, far more subtle, that should not be overlooked while reviewing the progress in India-Pakistan relations. As a legacy of Congress-Muslim League confrontation in pre-partition days, the issues between India and Pakistan have become interwoven into the domestic politics of both countries, particularly in India, which is a functioning democracy.

No doubt, a climate of detente marks the scene in South Asia today. Public opinion in both the countries overwhelmingly supports the peace process. But at the same time, the dialogue process is not insulated from the pressures and thrusts of domestic politics, especially in India. That is why Vajpayee’s warning to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on his Pakistan and Kashmir policies has caused a severe setback to the entire dialogue process.

After the visit of the moderate Hurriyat leaders to Pakistan in June, former prime minister and BJP leader Atal Behari Vajpayee, in a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, expressed concern over the peace process with Pakistan. His main objections were:

* the growing demand for ‘trilateral talks’.

* ‘Allowing Hurriyat leaders to travel to Pakistan without passports has made India the target of international mockery’.

* Pakistan was being allowed ‘to slip’ out of its commitments.

Vajpayee’s criticism of Manmohan Singh’s Kashmir and Pakistan policy has cast a shadow over the peace process. As a matter of fact, his salvo signalled the collapse of a consensus between the ruling Congress and the main opposition party, BJP, that the peace process with Pakistan contained political benefits for both the parties. The Congress hoped to earn economic and psychological dividends of peace in South Asia. The BJP claimed it were they who had started the peace process and for that reason hoped to win over the Muslim vote in India.

It will be most unfortunate if Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, already watchful after Vajpayee’s warning, casts a cautious glance over his shoulders, during his next-week’s meeting in New York with President Pervez Musharraf. He knows his party rivals are just waiting for a slip on his part.

Pakistan’s domestic politics is also not insulated from the cut and thrust of India-Pakistan issues. But the task of the man at the top in Pakistan is comparatively easy. Facing no elections until 2007, the detractors of the president can be kept at bay as long as Islamabad can show progress on Kashmir. But if New Delhi does not show any urgency in resolving the issue and is hesitant to make even easy concessions, a loss of momentum in the peace process will force Islamabad into harder positions. The one charge that no Pakistani leader, including President Musharraf, can lay himself open to is that of a sell-out to India.

The CBMs have been helpful in strengthening the peace process. They also have a considerable symbolic and practical value. As a matter of fact, the CBMs have kept the peace process moving in the absence of any forward movement on the issues discussed under the composite dialogue. So far the momentum of the peace process has been maintained by the CBMs alone. But that state of affairs cannot last long as CBMs cannot be a substitute for substantive issues, which must be addressed at this stage.

The history of half a century of India-Pakistan relations amply shows that tangible progress on substantive issues will not be possible as long as New Delhi and Islamabad continue to distrust each other. They have to realize that they will never be able to resolve any of their disputes, let alone the sensitive and complicated Kashmir issue, unless they start trusting each other and ensure they don’t abuse each other’s trust.

It, however, augurs well that there is an increasing realization on both sides of the border that half a century of confrontation has taken too heavy a toll on two generations of their people and that it is now time to resolve bilateral disputes and concentrate on building the foundations of peace, friendship and cooperation in South Asia.

The writer is a former ambassador.

RETIRED Air Marshal Nur Khan’s disclosure about the 1965 war is correct in the sense that Pakistan imposed the war on India. But the person responsible for it was not General Mohammed Ayub Khan, then the Pakistan president, but his foreign minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. My contention is based on the conversation I had with Ayub in 1972, soon after the Bangladesh war. By then he had retired and lived at his bungalow in Islamabad.

As irony had it, Bhutto was the president. While going over the discussions at Tashkent, where I met Ayub for the first time, the reference to the 1965 war also cropped up. I was keen to know who had started hostilities. Ayub refused to say anything. My persistence evoked one comment from him: “You would be meeting Bhutto, find out from him. It was his war.”

That very afternoon, I met Bhutto. I repeated what Ayub had said, blaming him for the war. Bhutto did not deny his role. His case was that he thought Pakistan could beat India at that time. The various ordnance factories which Delhi had established, he said, had not yet gone into full production then and once they did, India would be too strong to beat. Bhutto explained his reasoning in a taped interview. It is a long one. I am reproducing a part of it here.

“There was a time when militarily, in terms of the big push, in terms of armour, we were superior to India because of the military assistance we were getting and that was the position up to 1965. Now that the Kashmir dispute was not being resolved and its resolution was also essential for the settlement of our disputes and as it was not being resolved peacefully and we having had this military advantage, we were blamed for it.

“So it would, as a patriotic prudence, be better to say, all right, let us finish this problem and come to terms and come to a settlement. It has been an unfortunate thing. So that is why up to 1965, I thought that with this edge that we had we could have morally justified it. Also, because India was committed to self-determination and it was not being resolved and we had this situation.

“But now this position does not exist. I know it does not exist. I know better than anyone else that it does not exist and that it will not exist in the future also...”

Bhutto had also been taken in by certain happenings in India at that time. He had interpreted the DMK demand for autonomy, the Akali movement for Punjabi Suba and the Maharashtra-Mysore border dispute as evidence of India falling apart. Therefore, his thesis was: the sooner Pakistan decided to “settle its scores” with India, the better it was.

Long before the war, Bhutto had prepared a working paper which came to be known as the “Bhutto Plan”. Infiltration in Kashmir in September, according to the plan, was a sequel to the Rann of Kutch operation in January-April, 1965. What started in the Rann of Kutch was a clash between the border police. It soon involved the armed forces of both sides. Pakistan seemed to have prepared for the battle; it had troops ready. It also had not only an airport near the Rann of Kutch but also a network of roads, over which it could bring up armour.

Most Indian cabinet ministers wanted an all-out offensive in this area. But prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and General J.N. Chaudhri, then chief of the army staff, were opposed to it. The former did not want his strategy of having good relations with Pakistan rather than with China lost in what he called a swamp. Chaudhri’s assessment was that the Kutch operation was a diversionary attack to pin down as many Indian forces as possible for a later attack somewhere else.

Probably it was. However, Rawalpindi’s calculation that there would be an uprising in Kashmir following the infiltration misfired. It was the Kashmiris — Mohammed Din from Gulmarg and Wazir Mohammed from Mendhar, Jammu — who were the first to tell the Kashmir police about the infiltration. Pakistan’s plans to distribute arms and ammunition to the local population and to organize a revolt remained on paper.

On September 1, Ayub had broadcast that by supporting the people of Kashmir to exercise their right of self-determination Pakistan was doing no more than what it had always pledged. He asked the Kashmiris to rise like one man. When Ayub heard that there was no response, his comment was that it was Bhutto who made him go wrong in his assessment of the Kashmiris’ attitude. Bhutto told me later that he had no regrets about having persuaded Ayub to send in the infiltrators.

The war, as Pakistan calls it, or the conflict, as Indian official records say, lasted 23 days from September 1 to 23. Both sides claimed victory. For Pakistan it was its “finest hour” and for India it was the redemption of the honour it had lost in 1962 in the fighting against the Chinese. Rawalpindi claimed that Indian efforts to capture Lahore and Sialkot were rebuffed through better organization, training, planning and dedication.

I was told in Pakistan that Indians were dreaming of a banquet in Lahore but the dinner jackets were never worn as the DJ-wallas were all slaughtered by our valiant fighters. Many asked me whether it was a fact that Chandni Chowk and Connaught Place in Delhi and Hall Bazaar in Amritsar had been so heavily bombed that they were beyond recognition.

New Delhi said its aim was to destroy Pakistan’s armour, not to occupy territory; therefore, all those who wanted to measure gain in terms of key towns like Lahore and Sialkot were wrong. Both General Chaudhri and Air Marshal Arjun Singh said that India essentially fought a war of attrition and achieved its aim. But the Indians were generally disappointed that neither Lahore nor Sialkot was captured. Then Egyptian president Nasser told Dr Radhakrishnan, then India’s president, who was returning to New Delhi via Cairo, that if India had captured Lahore its prestige would have gone up.

Chaudhri has explained in his book, ‘Defence of India’ that “politically the destruction of Lahore was most unwise and militarily this would have meant the use of far more troops than were available. Whatever the explanation, the fact was that neither side registered a decisive victory, though India did have an edge over Pakistan, particularly when it wrested Haji Pir and Tithwal, two important positions in Azad Kashmir.

The overall gains were minimal. In the words of Lt Gen Harbaksh Singh, then heading the Western Command, “although we did succeed in whittling down Pakistan’s fighting potential, especially armour and occupied chunks of her territory, most of our offensive actions fizzled into a series of stalemates without achieving any decisive results.”

The writer is a leading columnist based in New Delhi