The chief merit of Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri’s book Neither A Hawk Nor A Dove: An Insider’s Account of Pakistan’s Foreign Policy is that it is the first authoritative confirmation of a highly important step India and Pakistan took to resolve the contentious issue of Kashmir. As Pakistan’s foreign minister (2002-07), Kasuri has the right credentials to tell us that former prime minister Manmohan Singh and former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf had come close to reaching an innovative agreement on Kashmir. This has been reconfirmed by S.K. Lambah, India’s former envoy to Islamabad, who served as Manmohan’s backchannel interlocutor with Tariq Aziz, his Pakistani counterpart. The post-Musharraf governments in Pakistan, including the incumbent one headed by Nawaz Sharif, have not disowned the consensus-based solution.
Invitation To A Peace Trade
Kasuri describes how India and Pakistan almost negotiated a deal on Kashmir. They must take that road again.
Obviously, Narendra Modi, given the decisive parliamentary majority he enjoys, has a historic opportunity to resolve this most vexed dispute by building on the groundwork prepared by his predecessor. Sadly, neither he nor his party has so far given any indication about how they wish to resolve the Kashmir issue bilaterally, as is mandated by the Simla Pact of 1972. However, the RSS, the mother organisation of India’s current ruling party, has already poured cold water on any consensus-based approach to resolving the dispute. In a recent comment on Kasuri’s book, Organiser, the RSS mouthpiece, wrote: “The only honourable solution to the J&K issue is [for Pakistan] to return to Bharat all territories illegally occupied by Pakistan.” Most BJP supporters will say the same thing.
If this were ever a realistic solution, the dispute over Kashmir would have ended long ago. However, Pakistan, which questions the legitimacy of J&K’s accession to India, is not going to vacate its part of Kashmir. The RSS can of course ask Modi to secure the ‘honourable solution’ by ordering the Indian army to cross the LoC and forcibly wrest Pak-occupied Kashmir. But doing so would mean gross violation of the Simla Pact. Also, PoK has not come to India despite several India-Pakistan wars since 1947. If the RSS wants the Modi government to fight an aar-paar ki ladaai to reclaim PoK, it will surely be a nuclear war. The least one expects from India’s jingoists who hate Pakistan—and also from Pakistan’s jingoists who hate India—is that they understand its catastrophic consequences.
Hence, as Kasuri’s book argues, the time has come for India and Pakistan to think out of the box and arrive at a mutually acceptable peaceful and compromise-based solution, and also acceptable to the suffering people of Jammu & Kashmir on both sides of the LoC. Kasuri tells us: “President Musharraf and Prime Minister Singh fundamentally agreed upon the following four points: (1) Jammu & Kashmir could not be made independent; (2) borders could not be redrawn; (3) the LoC could be made irrelevant [by allowing Kashmiris on both sides to travel and trade freely]; and (4) a Joint Mechanism for both parts of Kashmir could be worked out.” Some differences between India and Pakistan still remained. Nevertheless, the two sides embraced the same basic goal—J&K should become a bridge, and not remain a barrier, between India and Pakistan.
On the Indian side, both Atal Behari Vajpayee’s BJP and Manmohan-Sonia Gandhi’s Congress had accepted the idea of a constructive compromise. Kasuri refers to Vajpayee’s bold promise, contained in his ‘Kumarakom Musings’, “to seek a lasting solution to the Kashmir problem” and further that “in this quest, both in the internal and external dimensions of the problem, the beaten tracks of the past shall not be traversed”. (I had played a humble role in Atalji’s pathbreaking ‘Kumarakom Musings’ when I was in the PMO.) Kasuri also refers to Manmohan’s landmark interview with British journalist Jonathan Power, shortly after being sworn in (May 22, 2009). About the parameters of a possible Kashmir solution, Manmohan had stated: “Short of secession, short of redrawing boundaries, the Indian establishment can live with anything.”
Kasuri deserves kudos for unequivocally addressing two key concerns among Indians of diverse political persuasions. First, many Indians believe that the Pakistan army does not want peace with India. Kasuri, however, affirms that the army leadership, including the ISI, “were on board on the framework of the Kashmir settlement on which both sides had made remarkable progress on the backchannel”. Musharraf, according to him, was even prepared to leave the “UN resolutions on plebiscite aside” in the quest for a negotiated settlement of the Kashmir issue. “Based on my experience of dealing with the Pakistan army for five years,” Kasuri writes, “it is not averse to peace with India, provided it is a just peace.”
India’s second concern is over cross-border terrorism, which has repeatedly stalled dialogue. Kasuri minces no words in stating that the Pakistani establishment has erred in promoting religious extremism and militancy. According to him, “influential sections of public opinion and [those] in the corridors of power” have concluded that Pakistan’s policy of support to non-state actors has “actually boomeranged against it”. “Pakistan also discovered, to its horror, that some of the groups fighting in Kashmir could just as easily attack its own civilians and military. In many cases, intelligence and law enforcement agencies were also targeted. There was a rising recognition among the middle classes of the media that Kashmir and other issues with India could not be resolved by resorting to violence by non-state actors. It is now by and large accepted in Pakistan that the activities of non-state actors in Afghanistan and Kashmir caused a lot of difficulties for Pakistan and have come back to haunt it.” Kasuri quotes Pakistan’s former army chief, Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, as admitting publicly that the internal threat to Pakistan was greater than the external.
I have limited my comments on Kasuri’s voluminous book to only two issues—Kashmir and terrorism—because these have become seemingly insurmountable hurdles in the normalisation of Indo-Pak relations. The deadlock can be broken only if both sides do honest soul-searching. Successive Indian governments have rightly demanded that Pakistan fulfil its commitment not to allow any terrorist activity targeting India from territory under its control. Indeed, as urged by numerous patriotic Pakistanis themselves, Pakistan needs to act effectively and without making the disingenuous distinction between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ terrorists, not so much to meet India’s demand as to eliminate a dire threat to its own security, unity and survival.
And yet, India cannot pretend that cross-border terrorism is the core or the only issue remaining to be resolved between Pakistan and itself. The phenomenon of terrorism originated after the 1980s, whereas Kashmir has been the unfinished core agenda between our two countries since 1947. The Modi government should not give the impression to Pakistanis, and to the international community, that it has no intention to discuss the Kashmir issue with Pakistan. Clearly, neither status quo nor a policy of ambiguity on Kashmir is sustainable for long. If India and Pakistan do not resume meaningful and productive talks on all outstanding issues, especially Kashmir, they will, sooner or later, slide towards another war, a war that cannot solve any problem but will create new ones.
As is now well known, the Shiv Sena, another flag-bearer of ultra-nationalism in India, had threatened to violently disrupt Kasuri’s book launch in Mumbai, which I had organised. It is therefore necessary for me to endorse Kasuri’s courageous call here: “It is vital not to provide any space to extremist elements in Pakistan and India as their hate-woven counter-narrative sustains the conflict between India and Pakistan. As a matter of fact, such elements have a vested interest in continued friction between the two countries.”
Whenever the history of eventual India-Pakistan rapprochement is written, Kasuri’s book will surely be recognised as having made a valuable contribution to it. It is written, with an amazing amount of research, by a passionate Pakistani patriot who is also a genuine friend of India.
(Kulkarni was an aide to former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in the PMO between 1998 and 2004)
The Word
Sudheendra Kulkarni was in Karachi for Kasuri’s book launch, where the proceedings were far more amiable. He got a standing ovation after his speech, where he said—a la L.K. Advani—that India should de-demonise Jinnah. Gen Pervez Musharraf was in the audience.