By Force Of Dead Habit

Musharraf’s key concession—the one that opened the doorway to peace—came during an Iftar party in October 2004. When asked by Pakistani journalists about the peace process, he said a possible solution was turning the entire former state of Kashmir into some form of federation under the joint management of India and Pakistan. New Delhi reacted to this with horror but failed to realise its significance: Musharraf had told his own people to abandon the idea that Pakistan was entitled to the whole of Kashmir by virtue of its Muslim majority but had been cheated of it by an accession based upon fraud. Needless to say, the ensuing furore in Pakistan dwarfed anything we saw in India, but the fact remained that Musharraf had opened the road to a rational, negotiated compromise.

The three-point framework for peace that he and Manmohan Singh announced in Delhi last April, committing both countries to eliminating the boundary between the two parts of Kashmir in stages, had itself completed Pakistan’s dissociation from its past positions. Also, it offered Kashmiri nationalists in Jammu and Kashmir a solution that seemed to make worthwhile the sacrifices they had made in the past 15 years. After all, it promised to restore freedoms they had lost in 1947 when their state was partitioned by war.

It was in New York last September that Musharraf took the last crucial step towards a negotiated settlement. During his dinner with Manmohan Singh, he proposed "self-rule" and "joint control" as the bases for working out a final settlement. His proposals were vague—perhaps intentionally so—but they set off an immense churning of ideas in Pakistan, India and both parts of Kashmir. Seminars and conferences have followed on each others’ heels, bringing about a convergence of views that has put peace within our grasp. That is what makes New Delhi’s reluctance to respond to Musharraf extremely hard to understand.

New Delhi has reservations about both Musharraf’s style of public diplomacy and the studied vagueness of his prescriptions. It also harbours doubts about the extent to which he can carry with him his bureaucrats and, more importantly, his corps commanders. But in the end, these are problems for himself to resolve. India stands to lose nothing by meeting Musharraf’s invitations to further talks half way in order to work out the details of an agreement on Kashmir and other Indo-Pak issues. But New Delhi has created another obstacle to talks: the precondition that Pakistan must stop all terrorism and infiltration from across the Line of Control before talks on Kashmir can go any further. The catch is that India has made itself the sole judge of when Pakistan fulfils this condition. This has given the Indian security and intelligence apparatus final control of the peace process, and it has used this control to stall any further meeting between the prime minister and Musharraf.

The arguments it has put forward have apparently convinced the prime minister to fall in line with their thinking. Infiltration and terrorism have come down in Kashmir, but Pakistan has not relented upon its deadly intention to dismantle the Indian union by stoking insurgency elsewhere. It has therefore continued to build bases in Nepal and Bangladesh to support operations in India. What’s worse, it is quietly encouraging the activities of the Lashkar-e-Toiba, which has begun a deadly campaign to ignite communal violence in India. Even in Kashmir, although the number of infiltrators has gone down, Pakistan has not dismantled the terrorism infrastructure that it has built up over the past two decades. Musharraf is therefore speaking from both sides of his mouth—one message for India and the world, and another for the ISI and the Pakistan army.

Since the home ministry has never revealed the evidence from which it has drawn its conclusions, it is futile to discuss their degree of correctness. But what is surprising is the prime minister’s failure to see the flaw in the precondition that he has allowed to be set: if Musharraf has genuinely done all he can to end cross-border terrorism, then refusing to talk till he has done still more makes the peace process hostage to the LeT’s will. All it has to do to is stage a Varanasi, Delhi or Bangalore every few weeks so that Pakistan and India stay permanently at war.

On the other hand, if Musharraf is allowing a minimum level of terrorism because he believes that this is the only way to make India come to the negotiating table, then the surest way to end terrorism is to engage in talks with him and make any future commitment by India, such as the partial withdrawal of the armed forces from the Valley, conditional upon Musharraf halting the infiltration and terrorism that is still going on. Musharraf has already made such an offer. By taking him up on it, India will either stop the terrorism or expose Musharraf’s duplicity. Whatever happens, it emerges the winner. So, why is it hanging back?