Of India's Pakistan Policy: Is Delhi chasing its own tail ?

THE recent Foreign Ministers’ dialogue has apparently restored the trajectory of engagement that has been periodically battered by the reality of India-Pakistan relations over the past decade. Pakistan’s Foreign Minister declared that both sides desired to make the dialogue an “uninterrupted and uninterruptible process”. India’s Foreign Minister declared the visit as “a new era of bilateral cooperation”. Clearly, the national mood has changed, and even the fiercest critics of an engagement with Pakistan have conceded that bilateral interactions cannot remain frozen. Even the political opposition is now positioning itself as the pioneers of India’s diplomatic breakthrough with Pakistan!

The resumption of dialogue is an admission that India’s principled stand on terrorism – “no talks before the Pakistani perpetrators of 26/11 are brought to justice” – has lost its steam. Of course, this strategic and elite rethink is shaped by geopolitics. The Indian government is acutely sensitive about the prevailing geopolitical situation vis-à-vis American dilemmas in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and is unwilling to rock the boat. Talks with Pakistan should be viewed in that backdrop – Delhi will do nothing to undermine the civilian façade in Islamabad and appears content in going through the motions of a dialogue.

Such a backdrop has made it easy for Delhi to rubbish its own post-26/11 Pakistan posture as a long and fruitless sulk. The American Secretary of State’s recent visit and the re-elevation of a grand vision for India’s impending rise has made re-engaging our troubled neighbour easier. Plainly put, Washington’s reassurance to Delhi has spurred the latter to reassure Pakistan.

This is an apt moment to step back and deconstruct India’s Pakistan policy. Over the past decade, three distinct prescriptions have been proffered for a Pakistan policy. First, engage on the premise that Pakistan will transform. Second, adopt a posture of benign neglect or, to put it more bluntly, let Pakistan “stew in its own juice”. Third, actively implement the policies of containment and covert insurrection as a quid pro quo for Pakistan’s diabolical proxy war.

Each prescription is based on fundamental assumptions about the underlying power structure and strategic calculus that drives Pakistani actors. Engagement is premised on the belief that the civilian and military establishments form a genuine cleavage and only if India would offer sustenance and legitimacy to the former, Rawalpindi would ultimately become either subordinated to a liberal modernising civilian leadership or at least face a countervailing power centre. The second and third groups rebut such a vision of restructuring the civil-military hierarchy in Pakistan as a fool’s errand because the civilian and military elite are two sides of the same coin and share a common legacy and legitimacy to power. In this view, the military underwrites the feudal-Punjabi monopoly, and a decline of the GHQ will also mean the decline of the old feudal order that feeds the present civilian leadership.

In more recent years, the first group has discovered a new rationale for engagement: the present Pakistani order, however, unpleasant is preferable to the radical Islamists that could follow. This is rebutted with the argument that the Islamists are nurtured and sustained by the status quo actors in Pakistan as part of a well-documented strategy, and radicalism would lose its resonance in a truly democratic Pakistan.

Finally, the first group reinforces its argument on the notion that there is no alternative to talking in an age where extensive use of force has been ruled out in a nuclearised subcontinent. This again finds a counter-view: talking versus an outright war is a false binary choice deliberately contrived to suppress the several nuanced and complex postures that can be adopted in between. Here India’s doctrinal and strategic inflexibility has arguably enabled Pakistan to overplay its nuclear deterrent.

To be sure, the most optimal policy should be informed by some or all of these perspectives. Using the arguments of the first group, India’s actual policy is once again being driven by an impulse for engagement for its own sake. Ironically, both India and Pakistan appear content with the present mode of engagement. Neither expect to give or receive major concessions. The political flux in both countries circumscribes any radical overhaul in bilateral relations.

And then there are some aspects of Indian policy that are truly baffling. Delhi was presented with an extraordinary window of opportunity in the 2000s where Pakistan’s Afghan pre-occupations should have made shoring up India’s position on Kashmir a priority. Inexplicably, India expended an extraordinary amount of diplomatic and material resources on Afghanistan while barely providing strategic attention to a core interest on its own frontiers.

Today, India is in a situation where it has neither attained a sustainable position in Afghanistan that can hold its own after an American drawdown nor has it shored up its strategic advantage on Kashmir. It is now being suggested that engagement with Pakistan can help India raise its profile in Afghanistan. In other words, putting the cart before the horse!

The fundamental problem in India’s Pakistan policy is that it is a series of tactical events masquerading as a strategy. Pakistan’s policy remains driven by real tactical incentives where multidimensional security dilemmas such as pressure on its western frontiers and domestic instability have made it rational for Rawalpindi and Islamabad to pursue a détente with India. Pakistan’s overall grand strategy of cultivating a permanent hostility with India, however, cannot change in the present power configuration within Pakistan. The feudal-military nexus views genuine democratisation as accelerating the diminishment and perhaps denouement of the present Punjabi elite. And the India “threat” without and Islamisation within is seen as the only assured means to preserve the present power monopoly and stave off centrifugal pressures. India’s engagement then, ironically, legitimises and offers breathing space to the very actors that the policy is presumably intended to ultimately subdue – the feudal-military elite.

India has never seriously introspected on what it truly seeks within Pakistan. Does it seek a perpetuation of a farcical democratic status quo with the feudal-military superstructure at its apex even if this configuration of power produces a chaotic equilibrium in India-Pakistan relations with the occasional recourse to Washington’s good offices? Or does India seek a sincere democratisation in a federal multi-ethnic structure of power even if that weakens the present incumbents? Whether by design or sheer drift, India has been pursuing the former conservative path for the past decade.

Perhaps only a stronger and more stable India can contemplate a strategic future for Pakistan that envisages a truly transformational subcontinent. Until then, India will be chasing its own tail on Pakistan.

Zorawar Daulet Singh is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Alternatives

Courtesy: The Tribune, 04 August 2011

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