Irfan Husain

I CANNOT think of any two countries, apart from India and Pakistan, where the category of tourist visas simply does not exist for each other’s citizens. So if you want to fly to New Delhi or Mumbai from Pakistan, you are obliged to invent non-existent family members to justify your visit. Worse, you are forced to undergo the time-wasting humiliation of reporting to the police every week. This again must be a unique example of how two neighbours treat visitors from each other’s borders.

We were reminded of these unpleasant realities by Praful Bidwai as he spoke in Karachi recently on the relations between the two countries after they conducted tit-for-tat nuclear tests in 1998. Praful is a writer who speaks as clearly as he thinks and writes.

Over the years, he has established himself as a crusader for peace and sanity in South Asia, and his articles on various social and political issues in India and the region used to appear regularly in this newspaper. However, since the editors stopped subscribing to the Inter-Press Service, we have been deprived of Praful’s insights.

During his talk, his anger against the bureaucratic-military establishments in both India and Pakistan shone through. The fact that both have blocked virtually every aspect of a normal relationship between neighbouring countries is a disgrace. Indeed, the contortions both governments put themselves through to prevent normal contacts would have been funny had it not been for their tragic consequences in terms of missed opportunities. Commerce, tourism, cultural exchanges and investment possibilities have all been thwarted by hawks on both sides.

Giving an example of this rigid mindset, Praful told us about a talk he had given recently in Lahore at a conference. There, he suggested that to break the ice and encourage imports from Pakistan, the Indian government should lift all duties from a wide range of consumer goods. In response to this idea, a retired Pakistani ambassador stood up and said pompously: “We do not need such charity from India.” Praful replied that this was hardly charity as Indian consumers would benefit.

I suppose this character is one of the retired envoys who have announced their intention to join the long march called by the legal community. One wonders where these born-again democrats were when Musharraf sacked the judges on Nov 3, last year. Hundreds of lawyers, students and activists were beaten up and jailed while these worthies were nowhere to be seen. Now, as an elected coalition government is struggling to deal with complex issues, they are jumping on the bandwagon, secure in the knowledge that this administration is unlikely to react in the same brutal fashion Musharraf did.

One retired foreign secretary said at the press conference he and his colleagues had called to announce their intentions: “Our governments always interfere into the Foreign Office’s affairs and when they reach on decisions [sic] with foreign countries without taking the FO into confidence, the FO can do nothing but to honour these decisions.”

I suppose one should sympathise with his plight. But please note that for all the years he served as our ambassador to various countries, and then as foreign secretary, he did not utter a squeak to protest this encroachment on the FO’s turf. This goes for all his colleagues, of course.

In his book on the years he spent as deputy secretary at the US State Department, Strobe Talbot describes an incident that puts our FO in a very unflattering light. According to him, he was in Islamabad to defuse rising tension between India and Pakistan during Bill Clinton’s presidency. During talks at the FO, he made some suggestions for moves Pakistan should make, and apparently, his words provoked a senior Pakistani official to lunge towards the American in a bid to do him physical harm. So much for polished diplomacy. Incidentally, this gentleman has been writing in this newspaper for some time now.

These, then, are some of the people who have shaped much of our policy towards India. Of course it is the army that has dictated the broad contours of this policy, but the FO has gone along without anybody resigning in protest, at least to my knowledge. Indeed, some of our shriller hawks have been in the FO, and not in army GHQ.

It goes without saying that these hawks have their counterparts in India. Six decades of hostility and virulent propaganda have led to an impasse that neither side has the political will to break. To his credit, Musharraf has tried harder than anybody on either side to come up with new ideas. Unfortunately for over a billion Indians and Pakistanis, we have made very little progress. What little movement has come has been largely the result of back-channel diplomacy in which both FO/GHQ establishments were bypassed. According to a recent issue of The Economist, Tariq Aziz was a key figure in these secret talks on the Pakistani side.

However, as the failed talks between the two foreign ministers in Islamabad last month showed, the new Pakistani government has not charted a clear-cut policy on its relations with India. And yet both Nawaz Sharif and Asif Zardari have said many times they want to improve ties with our neighbour. The former was sincere in wanting to move forward during his second stint, and Benazir Bhutto reached out to Rajiv Ghandi’s government during her first tenure as premier. She paid for her initiative with the toppling of her government by the army.

Despite this slow dance of one step forward, two steps back, there is a greater urgency to improve relations with India than ever before. Musharraf’s peace moves were an implicit indication of the army’s recognition that Kashmir could not be won by force. This is a reality that should have by now dawned on the most hawkish of our establishment. Given the vastly changed strategic realities, this government should ignore the advice of our diplomats and generals, and think in political and economic terms. Above all, they should think in the larger interests of our people.

At a time when issues like food, water, terrorism and fuel have to be considered in regional and global terms, we cannot afford to remain frozen in past postures.