Intrepid Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir was on NDTV from Islamabad on

Sunday, complaining about a disjunction between India and Pakistan over the unofficially declared election results for the presidential race. He claimed that Indians and Americans loved to patronise General Pervez Musharraf when Pakistanis actually loathed him. Mehbooba Mufti, a free speaking leader from Indian administered Kashmir vented her views from Srinagar. She welcomed Musharraf’s victory because she saw him as a positive influence on the peace process with India. In other words Musharraf’s election is good news for Kashmir.

Former RAW chief A.S. Dulat was on the programme too. He hedged his bets about what lies ahead for Pakistan and there were no surprises in that. Congress Party spokesman Devendra Dwivedi tried to be diplomatic. He said India should leave it to the Pakistani people to decide what government or which leader was right for them. It was a neat thing to say but this is not how India’s foreign ministry often regards a strictly ‘internal’ happening in say Balochistan. Pakistan’s foreign ministry resents its comments from across the border. So there’s no consistency in keeping aloof, as advocated by Dwivedi, on what is internal for Pakistan from India’s perspective.

To add to the prevailing confusion in the TV studios, Pakistan’s leftist rabble-rouser Lal Khan was invited as a key participant to the ‘Hum Log’ programme. Lal Khan is editor of Asian Marxist Review. He was in Delhi to launch his new book ‘Partition: Can it be undone?’ Indian audiences loudly cheer anyone, more so a Pakistani, who was inclined to accept that the partition was a mistake. Little do they realise that if the partition was to be undone there would be countless casualties.

To begin with, the two armies would be reduced to penury and extremists like Narendra Modi and Qazi Hussain Ahmed would become jobless. Standard of living of customs touts and visa middlemen would decline. Also a most crucial career building assignment for sleuths and diplomats in both countries would vanish. The old colonial system of governance, which includes the use of religion to divide and rule as a policy, would be teetering on the brink of imminent collapse.

But if Hamid Mir’s notion is the prevalent one in Pakistan – that Indians and Americans like to deal with the army and not Pakistan’s civilian rulers – then it needs to be rectified right away for at least the Indian part of his apprehension. Prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, wrongly in my view, did not allow the Saarc summit in Kathmandu for more than a year because there was a coup in Pakistan and so he would not deal with Musharraf.

It is another matter that Vajpayee was laughably also the first world leader to greet Musharraf when he put on a sherwani in his transition from the sobriquet as chief executive to the nation’s de facto president. So there was inconsistency in Vajpayee’s approach to a military dictator but no serious plot to deal only with Pakistan’s army. Take Rajiv Gandhi’s famous, almost embarrassing, bonhomie with Benazir Bhutto. What became of it, and how would Mir explain it? Before his rendezvous with Benazir, Rajiv Gandhi had attended the first Saarc summit in the august company of unmatched coup leaders, Messrs Zia-ul-Haq and Hossain Mohammed Ershad of Bangladesh. This was in Dhaka in 1985. On the other hand, Rajiv’s mother, Indira Gandhi, tirelessly petitioned Gen Zia to spare the life of Bhutto with whom she had signed the Shimla Agreement.

But Hamid Mir is a journalist I greatly respect. So there must be some validity in what he was trying to say about India’s Musharraf bonding. Is it possible that his perceived pro-army tilt in India is actually a refraction of the American shadow over India during and after the Cold War? In other words, if we see the United States as the chief patron of Pakistan’s army then it is hardly possible that a pro-Soviet government in Delhi in the Cold War era would have much truck with its leaders, unless they were invited to Tashkent or some such pre-agreed venue.

On the American side of the bargain, the chummiest of relationships between the Delhi and Islamabad, one that fetched for an Indian prime minister Pakistan’s highest civilian award, existed between Morarji Desai and Zia-ul-Haq, both regarded as conduits to American influence in South Asia. After the Cold War, with the advent of Manmohan Singh as India’s chief neo-con interlocutor for Washington, the coast was more or less clear to deal with anybody in Pakistan who came from the American corner of the polity, civilian or military didn’t really matter.

The BJP, offspring of the Jana Sangh, India’s original party patronised by the West, naturally pursued the bonding despite the nuclear tests, and that produced the Lahore summit. Of course we are enormously thankful for it to Washington DC and also the efforts put in later by Colin Powell to avert a full-blown war in 2002.

Now that India is hurtling into the American camp, courtesy Manmohan Singh and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, with no one willing to stop the denouement except a desperate last ditch attempt by the Left, there is only one way ahead for its ties with Pakistan, designated Washington’s major non-Nato ally: lukewarm to friendly but decidedly never hostile again. That should be good news to all concerned in both countries.

But the United States is not sitting in Pakistan to shape Islamabad’s India policy in any major way other than to ensure that both don’t lunge at each other’s throats. The Americans have bigger fish to fry in Pakistan with or without a civilian pretence. There is a war brewing with Iran and there’s a war happening with a very well entrenched Afghan rebels. And it’s Pakistan, not India that happens to be in the immediate vicinity, in fact in the firing line of both eventualities.

It is true that Washington’s nuclear deal with Delhi with all its Iran-specific clauses in the Hyde Act would also be tested should a shooting war erupt, but India is not at the heart of the matter in Pakistan’s elections: it is Central Asia. Delhi’s brief will be simply not to be a nuisance in this American pursuit.

In brief, in the old-fashioned ways of the past, on both sides of the border, there were ideologically driven interlocutors. The leftists in Pakistan would support the pro-Soviet Congress. Leftists in India would support the PPP or whoever else got the blessings of Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

Thus the Congress and the PPP were on one side of the spectrum while BJP from India and other pro-American parties in Pakistan would be on the other side, which at one time also included the Jamaat-i-Islami. But listening to Lal Khan’s plea against “military rulers and bourgeois leaders”, and reading I.A. Rehman’s call in Dawn the other day, for a mass mobilisation of Pakistani people to fight the scourge of dictatorship, one is left wondering who that messianic leader could be. We hope for Hamid Mir’s sake, and for the region’s own self-interest, that it is a civilian one.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com