IN Karachi’s Keamari harbour, near Baba and Bhit islands and close to the Yacht Club, is a macabre sight: scores of wooden fishing boats are quietly rotting away. A few are still riding high in the water, but most are partly submerged, their hulls and masts tilting at crazy angles.

This watery graveyard contains the life-savings of hundreds of Indian fishermen who were unfortunate enough to cross the unmarked coastal boundary between Indian and Pakistani waters. Captured and locked up, they languish in jail, sometimes for years. Their release in exchange for Pakistani fishermen in Indian jails for a similar ‘crime’ depends on the state of relations between the two countries.

The rotting boats and the imprisoned fishermen are apt metaphors for the situation in which India and Pakistan find themselves. Frozen in their rigid position of no-war, no-peace, both countries take out their frustration on the weakest of the weak.

As the recent meetings between Indian and Pakistani officials showed yet again, there is little stomach for a sane and peaceful resolution of their outstanding problems on either side. They go through the rituals of pretending to negotiate, knowing full well that no agreements will emerge at the end of the exercise. There is simply no political will in either Islamabad or New Delhi to cut the Gordian knot.

And yet, there was a time when there was hope for a breakthrough. Under Benazir Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi in 1989, an agreement over the absurd squabble over the Siachen glacier was reached. Sadly, the Indian establishment torpedoed it before the ink had dried. And Musharraf, for all his flaws, as well his responsibility for the Kargil folly, genuinely tried to solve the festering Kashmir dispute, and presented some out-of-the-box ideas, including putting the UN resolutions aside. He was snubbed by India for his pains.

So if Pakistan, with its huge security problems, its dysfunctional civilian government and its prickly, blinkered generals, can make serious attempts at mending fences with its neighbour, why can’t India? After all, with its overwhelming military superiority, its rapidly expanding economy and the goodwill it has globally, it should be brimming with self-confidence. So what excuse does India have for not being more proactive and imaginative in promoting regional peace?

The truth is that somehow, despite its economic and military clout, India continues to punch well below its weight in the region. When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said recently that 25 per cent of all Bangladeshis hated India, he might have been undiplomatic, but he was saying something everybody knows. Here is a much smaller neighbour that owes India its very existence as an independent state, and yet anti-India sentiments in Bangladesh are rampant.

Or take Sri Lanka, an even smaller neighbour. In the closing stages of the civil war two years ago, tens of thousands of Tamils were massacred, and India could do nothing to persuade Colombo to desist. This is despite the fact that the citizens of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu were convulsed at the sight of their cousins being slaughtered.

The only time India attempted to intervene in the conflict was when it sent a peace-keeping force to the island. These soldiers were pulled out after three years following heavy fighting with the LTTE. Since then, India remained a bystander while Pakistan and China armed and trained government forces. So although India is helping Sri Lanka with various infrastructure projects, it has very little influence in Colombo.

Or take Nepal, another of India’s neighbours that has gone though a long and bloody civil war. Although the land-locked nation’s economy is almost completely integrated with India’s, New Delhi was unable to intervene in the civil war, or in the long political crisis that has paralysed the country.

Even within India, the expanding Naxalite insurrection, as well as other separatist movements in Mizoram and Kashmir, highlight the establishment’s lack of imagination and self-confidence. These problems have been around for decades, and continue to get worse rather than better. Surely some creative ideas ought to have been put forward by now. But force seems to be the only answer New Delhi is capable of.

India’s successful entrepreneurs have seized opportunities created by globalisation, as well as by their country’s growing middle class and its trained manpower. Indian politicians, diplomats and civil servants, on the other hand, retain their old mindset from an era when India was just another developing nation. Instead of using its expanded hard and soft power to have a greater say in the region, India appears to be a timid player on the world stage.

In order to translate its growing strength into influence, India need not be the bully on the block, as it has so often seemed to its smaller neighbours. Given its resources and expertise in many fields, it can reach out to extend a helping hand. It can and should expand trade, and encourage its entrepreneurs to invest in the region.

The regional organisation, Saarc, must be reactivated to become the platform for expanding regional trade and travel it was designed to be. But for any of this to happen, India needs to break out of its timorous frame of mind and think big. Before it can be seriously accepted as a major global player, it has to sort out its regional disputes.

Whenever I have suggested that India can afford to be magnanimous as it is so much more powerful than Pakistan, I am routinely attacked by Indian readers. But what’s the alternative? Clearly, Pakistan’s generals are too insecure to take the initiative, and its shaky civilian government is in no position to take up from where Musharraf left off.

However, both Asif Zardari and Nawaz Sharif have expressed their desire to normalise relations with India.Somehow, the political elites as well as the media in both countries are quite content with the status quo. They seem to think that it is perfectly normal to stay locked in a confrontation for decades when the rest of the world is moving ahead. And while India has done phenomenally well in recent years, the majority of its population still lives in abject poverty.

A few years ago, I was at a conference in Colombo to discuss the Kashmir problem, and a retired Pakistani general said: “India is a big country with a small heart.” High time Indians proved him wrong.

irfan.husain@gmail.com