KARACHI: “The Pakistan-India relationship is the world’s most complex bilateral relationship. There are no other two nation states in the entire world and the 193 members of the United Nations with the kind of multilayered complexity as Pakistan and India,” said former senator Javed Jabbar during his talk about ‘Pakistan-India relations — future, known and unknown’ organised by the Society for Global Moderation here on Wednesday.

“The people of both countries have a long history together and yet there are distinct differences in that history. What is today Pakistan, some may think as an accident of history because the Cabinet Mission Plan failed so Pakistan became inevitable and Mr Jinnah was willing to live in a confederal continuity in the region. Throughout history this area which is Pakistan was mostly ... autonomous,” he said.

“We have vivid asymmetries and symmetries and unresolved disputes from Kashmir to Siachen. But like the Sphinx with half of its face broken, it is difficult to tell what it was initially or whether the Pakistan and India relationship is destined to be jinxed,” he said, while pointing out that August 1947 saw the birth of two different states which was more about gaining independence than partition. “It was actually the partition of Punjab and Bengal than the breaking of Maha Bharat,” he explained.

He further said that when talking about Pakistan-India relationship one was also talking about the internal state and society. “There are no people to people relations if the state doesn’t want it,” he said while explaining that visas were issued by states after which the people could travel to each others’ countries and meet and statements including terms such as ‘the will of the people’ were only used by politicians.

Coming to Pakistan and its society, Mr Jabbar said that it was actually quite secular. “In contrast the Indian state calls itself secular but its society is quite religious. It reflects Hindu dominance,” he said, adding that although there may be streaks of extremism here the voters had never voted a religious party into office whereas Hindutva, which is a very aggressive form of Hinduism, had led to electoral revolution in India.

Coming back to the relationship between both states, it was said that despite Pakistan’s fixation with Bollywood, we don’t really comprehend India. And as for South India we don’t know it. And in India even erudite scholars get things wrong [about] Pakistan and its people. Mr Jabbar held both Pakistan and India responsible for the problems between them. “The mess is a shared responsibility,” he said, adding that Pakistan provoked the 1965 war. “It was a miscalculation on our part in the first 18 years of Pakistan when we did so well proving people like Vallabhbhai Patel, who predicted Pakistan’s end within its first six months, wrong despite going into conflict within that period with India over Kashmir. This country not just survived it also managed economic growth despite political instability to be seen as a model and then we went into war in 1965,” he said, adding that similarly Kargil too had not been thought through.

But he reminded how India too violated the Simla Agreement, saying that it was indeed a shared responsibility but with the onus on India because it is after all six times bigger than Pakistan. And yet in all the Saarc countries it is only Pakistan which has the capacity and will to challenge India. “The onus is also on India based on how it grabbed Kashmir through fraud and how it shamelessly invaded East Pakistan,” he pointed out.

Then coming to the multiple asymmetries, he spoke of Pakistan’s coastline as compared to India’s much longer one, the resources of both countries where Pakistan only had oil storage capacity for seven to 10 days as there was no supply pipeline as yet. In culture too India had a soft power image which was a better global image. To balance both counties, he reminded of nuclear weapons which if used means mutual destruction. Also Pakistan ranks higher in the World Happiness Index that reflects this nation’s will to survive. Still, he said that the future is going to bring increased pressures on Pakistan, mostly economical. Pakistan also faces more military deployment, he said, which cannot be ignored. “Post-May 2019, I have no idea what will happen,” he concluded.

Published in Dawn, March 13th, 2019