ISLAMABAD, Feb 2: Indian diplomat-turned-politician Mani Shankar Aiyer believes that India and Pakistan today have the choice to continue living in “simmering hostility” and suffer or engage pro-actively and prosper.
“History may have divided us, but geography bind us,” he said speaking on “India and Pakistan: Retrospect and Prospect” in the Jinnah Institute's “distinguished speaker” programme on Tuesday.
Together “the Siamese twins” have the potential to make the sub-continent the “sonay ki chirya” (golden bird) of the centuries past, he told his appreciative and amused audience.
After tracing “the generic, institutional, endemic and episodic factors” that contributed to building the hostility, he concluded that 90 per cent of the people in the two countries no more nurse that dark past. But, regrettably, “national hostility has replaced the communal animosity of the past”.
Today, promoters of peaceful coexistence and cooperation between the two nations face “institutional hurdles”. In Pakistan, India was painted as a revanchist state, and in India, Pakistan as a failed or failing state and exporter of terrorism.
Such views need to be countered, he pleaded.
“No one in India is for Akhand Bharat. These are futile thoughts of the past ... and any strategy built on the presumption that Pakistan cannot survive is misconceived, misplaced and dangerously misleading.
“Pakistan is modern nation-state, now under serious threat from armed religious fanatics, but it is not about to succumb as a society or as a state to elements who, even in a moderate garb, have rarely managed to win more than a tiny handful of seats in any election,” said Mr Aiyer who was introduced as a man “who has more friends in Pakistan than enemies in India While recognising that Pakistan has suffered most from terrorism, the polished diplomat-statesman from India affirmed that “a joint strategy to counter terrorism will enable both India and Pakistan to overcome what is, in effect, a joint threat to our people”.
But that would require trust, he emphasised. Kashmir and river waters were “the endemic problems” between the two countries, he said and surprised many by crediting Gen Pervez Musharraf to have done most to resolve the Kashmir issue.
“There is no military solution. The United Nations has washed its hands off the Kashmir problem. Available records show a framework for solving the problem, without changing the frontiers, had been agreed in principle (under Musharraf),” he said.
An agreement would have been signed during Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's proposed visit to Islamabad in March 2007, he said, sighting “only if that visit had been advanced to February”.
The prospective agreement fell victim to the judicial crisis that erupted in March that year, leading to the exit of Gen Musharraf and a new government in the next year.
That brought Mr Aiyer to what he called “the episodic factors” that derailed, even reversed, the process of reconciliation and building peace.
Among them he counted the sudden death of Jawaharlal Nehru while Sheikh Abdullah was in Pakistan building bridges, India reneging on its agreement to demilitarise Siachin, the post-9/11 terror attack on Indian parliament in December 2001, and Islamabad's retraction of its offer to send ISI chief to India following the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai in 2008.
Still, the “shared inheritance” of living together for centuries and their people unburdened of communal animosity, raised the hope in Mr Aiyer that both countries “realistically become each other's most favoured nation”.
It was a sincere hope as Mr Aiyer choked while recalling his own days in Lahore as a child and how Ayub Khan inquired after his mother-in-law, widow of Ayub's Indian mate who was killed in World War II, each time he overflew India on his visits to East Pakistan as president.
His hope was shared by many in the audience but as an expatriate Pakistani, who has Indians and Bangladeshis among his friends in Britain, reminded “strategic decisions are made at the highest level”. That means the recalcitrant establishments of the two countries.
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