In his May 27 address to Pakistan, India, Kashmir and the world, Gen Pervez Musharraf struck an unusually belligerent tone. He referred to India not as "India" but as "the enemy". He also urged the world to take note of "the atrocities being committed by the Hindu extremists and terrorists in Kashmir, in Gujarat and elsewhere in India against Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and also their own scheduled castes". None of this boded well for the future. But he did make one categorical and, by and large, verifiable statement that gave a ray of hope for the future. He said, "I also want to tell the world and give the assurance that no infiltration is taking place across the Line of Control." This statement followed a meeting of the cabinet and the National Security Council of Pakistan which took a decision to stop jehadis from crossing the LoC into Jammu and Kashmir. If reports in the newspapers can be trusted, the government has also instructed the Pakistani 10th Corps in "Azad" Kashmir to stop the infiltration.
It is, of course, possible that he is still trying to have his cake and eat it. He can do this by continuing to infiltrate jehadis in twos and threes across the LoC. Such small groups would probably be able to evade the spy satellites though they wouldn't fool the Indian agencies in Kashmir for long. However, Gen Musharraf must know that this kind of double deceit is fraught with risk and could very easily backfire to Pakistan's disadvantage. It is therefore likely that if infiltration has not come down markedly already, it will do so in the next few days.
But for how long will the restraint last? The obvious answer is, not forever. Musharraf showed how skilled he is at turning crisis into opportunity when he parlayed his volte face on Afghanistan into a massive rescheduling of Pakistan's unsustainable foreign debt, large sums of fresh foreign aid, a renewed supply of arms and universal approbation from the international community. It's a safe bet that he'll attempt to turn the setback in Kashmir to his advantage in a similar manner.
Gen Musharraf has indicated more than once that he would like a demobilisation of the troops on the border and the resumption of a dialogue with India over the future of Kashmir. Since India has insisted that Pakistan must end cross-border terrorism/infiltration first, he is now in a position to claim that he has fulfilled his part of the bargain and to demand that India fulfill its part in the near future. New Delhi would be well within its rights to ask for time to make sure that the infiltration has indeed ceased, or at worst dwindled to a trickle. But it cannot defer action on this account for more than a few weeks. The longer Musharraf gets nothing in exchange for the very significant concession he has been forced to make, the more precarious will his own position within the nationalist establishment in Pakistan become. He will lose no time in making this clear to the international community which will, in turn, put steadily mounting pressure on India to accede to some of his wishes.
New Delhi would therefore do well to preempt being put on the defensive in this manner. It may baulk at pulling its troops back but there is no reason why it should not lift the ban on overflights, send its High Commissioner back to Pakistan and resume direct contact with Islamabad. If the response from Pakistan is satisfactory, it could resume the stalled dialogue between the two nations.
But in such a scenario, all the initiatives will have come from Pakistan: New Delhi's role will be purely reactive. This has admittedly been the pattern of all interactions with Pakistan over Kashmir during the past half century but it is, to say the least, unsatisfactory. The right course for New Delhi, if Islamabad calls a temporary halt to cross-border infiltration, is to find a way of institutionalising the peace and reinforcing the sanctity of the LoC.In the present climate of international opinion, the best way might be to approach the UN. The UN Security Council's resolution 1373 defined terrorism to include cross-border infiltration and disallowed the plea that freedom fighters do not constitute terrorists. India would do well to ask itself whether it doesn't stand to gain by approaching the Security Council to reinforce the sanctity of the LoC as a de facto international border pending a final settlement of the Kashmir issue, and to revive and reinforce the UN Military Observer Group.
This would admittedly involve a substantial change of policy. It was India that took the Kashmir dispute to the UN initially on January 1, 1948, and lived to rue the day. At the UN, the British delegation worked so consummately to sidetrack India's original complaint of aggression by Pakistan and to focus the Security Council's attention on the terms and conditions of a plebiscite that India found itself on the defensive, scrabbling to hold the moral high ground that it had taken for granted that it occupied. Since then, India has studiously avoided referring any problem to the UN and has made bilateralism its mantra in foreign policy.
But it takes only a moment to see that the case for strict bilateralism no longer holds. In 1948, there was no Security Council resolution No. 1373, and India and Pakistan were not nuclear powers. The Cold War is history. There is now a global consensus on terrorism and India has, by its coercive diplomacy, forced the international community to apply a single yardstick to define terrorism across the globe. The permanent members of the UN Security Council have already taken unambiguous positions on the cross-border infiltration into Kashmir. Thus, the likelihood of having any UN-mediated process being turned against India as it was in 1948 is virtually non-existent.