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IF it takes the armies of India and Pakistan as long to cross the border at Attari/Wagah as it does unarmed civilians, neither country need fear an invasion overland. The immigration formalities will keep the two forces so preoccupied with technicalities that exhausted, they will concede defeat and sue for peace.
Peace has been often defined as a state of no war. By that scale, Pakistan and India have been at peace for the past 44 years. Applying the narrower definition contained in Section III of the Hague Convention of 1907, they have lived in a state of ‘no-war peace’ since 1947, for, despite a number of quasi-mahabharatas — over Jammu & Kashmir in 1948, the Rann of Kutch in 1965, Bangladesh in 1971, and over the heights of Kargil in 1999 — neither country has ever formally declared war on the other.
Despite the pious expectations of the Hague Convention — that hostilities should be preceded by “a reasoned declaration of war or by an ultimatum with a conditional declaration of war” — Indo-Pak hostilities have begun without so much as the fig-leaf of an ultimatum. Each started with jingoistic bravado. Each ended in a hurried, petulant peace, brokered by third parties — the UN in 1948, the USSR in 1965, and the US in 1971 and 1999.
Just as the Indus Waters Treaty has survived every conflict since its execution in 1960, both India and Pakistan despite conflagrations above ground have maintained safer, subterranean levels of furtive contact. Responsible representatives from both sides have been tasked to tunnel beneath the Indian Ministry of External Affairs and Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to search for warrens of understanding.
Can the Lambah-Aziz formula on Kashmir be resurrected?
Most notably, Mr Satinder K. Lambah (once India’s high commissioner to Pakistan and later special envoy of prime minister Manmohan Singh, 2005-14) and Mr Tariq Aziz (Gen Pervez Musharraf’s trusted secretary of the National Security Council) burrowed unobtrusively for two years beneath a compacted overlay of misunderstandings, misadventures and suspicions to achieve a resolution of the core issue of Jammu & Kashmir. Each spoke with singular authority, because each enjoyed the absolute confidence of his principal.
Such furtive negotiations, akin to the Kissinger-Zhou Enlai contacts in 1970-1971 that led to US-China rapprochement, involved unsigned, unmarked proposals passing back and forth. Non-papers became parentless emissaries: fathered if they succeeded, orphaned if they didn’t.
In 2007, after two years of negotiations, Lambah and Aziz reached a solution deemed acceptable to all parties — India, Pakistan and the Gemini-twin Kashmiris. The final document would have been signed by Manmohan Singh and Musharraf, had the Pakistani lawyers’ movement not weakened and then emasculated Musharraf. He asked the Indians for time, then an extension. The Indians waited, and finally gave up hope. Lambah and Aziz were recalled, nursing their chagrin in private. Imagine an equivalent — British and French engineers working on the Chunnel, reaching the point of breakthrough that would connect both countries permanently, and then suddenly being forced to withdraw.
In May 2014, ambassador Lambah, speaking guardedly in his “personal capacity” at the University of Kashmir in Srinagar, provided tantalising details of how close Pakistan and India came to declaring peace. A “possible outline” provided that the Line of Control would be “like a border between normal states”. There would be “no redrawal of borders”.
The people of J&K “would move freely from one side to another”. Tariffs on locally produced goods would be removed progressively. Self-governance on both sides of the LoC would be ensured. “The essential prerequisite”, however, “was an end to hostility, violence and terrorism”, after which “military forces on both sides of the LoC would be kept to the minimum, particularly in populated areas”. The ‘D’ word — demilitarisation — found no mention anywhere in the final text. It would have been as inflammatory to the two armies as the ‘B’ word — beef — is to the BJP and Shiv Sena.
“Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with conflict by peaceful means,” that unlikely pacifist president Ronald Reagan once advised. The Lambah-Aziz understanding could well have ended 68 years of “conflict by peaceful means”.
Can the Lambah-Aziz formula be resurrected? Unlikely. Had Atal Behari Vajpayee still been prime minister, perhaps. However, today’s BJP government and its Shiv Sena claque boo Pakistan with undisguised abhorrence. The only ink they prefer to apply is not to any Indo-Pak agreement but to smear on the face of Mr Sudheendra Kulkarni (who dared to host a book launch by the former foreign minister Mian Khurshid Kasuri in Mumbai), and more recently to daub on J&K MLA Engineer Rashid who eats beef.
Might the Lambah-Aziz accord have been those precious words of peace that could have replaced “a thousand hollow ones”? Over a billion of us will never know.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, October 22nd, 2015
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