Musharraf’s Gambit

In his interview to The Hindu, Gen Pervez Musharraf has asked the Indian government to trust him. Should India do so? The answer, based on the rest of his interview, is ‘no’. According to Musharraf, Pakistan is absolutely against all forms of terrorism. Its ISI had nothing to do with the hijacking of IC 814 or with any other attacks on civilians and the state in India; the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen is not a terrorist organisation, at least not until India can prove that it was involved in the hijacking; Pakistan has nothing to do with the violence in Kashmir-it is Kashmiris who are fighting for their freedom. Even the Kargil war was not between Pakistan and India but between India and the mujahideen. India is simply using Pakistan as a whipping post at which to tie all of its own failures as a nation state.

Much of this is official Pakistani propaganda. Musharraf can therefore hardly be blamed for repeating it when he is speaking on the record. But there are contradictions in his own statements that make it difficult to trust him. First, he claims at one point that Pakistan has nothing to do with the violence in Kashmir but then goes on to say: "Now if the Indians are meaning that (atrocities) will continue and we should play absolutely no part in...ensuring that there is no infiltration.... This is being very unrealistic."

There is a far more serious contradiction. Musharraf, speaking as the head of the army, says he is for peace. But he was against the Sharif-Vajpayee meeting (he repeatedly calls it politicking); he was against the clubbing of Kashmir with all other issues in the Lahore declaration; he was against the Sharif-Clinton agreement on disengagement in Kargil, in fact he did not know about it. On the other hand, Nawaz Sharif knew and had approved all along of the operation in Kargil. Musharraf thus accuses Sharif of being criminally soft on India and Kashmir (hence his trial for treason). But this self-confessed hardliner then goes on to ask India to trust him to work out a solution to Kashmir.

The interview also tells us what kind of solution he has in mind. "There is no change between this utterance (the Lahore declaration) and the Simla accord. So there is no change whatsoever." Musharraf wants "a change" from the Simla accord. In short, he wants the Simla accord scrapped. He wants talks to start with a frank admission by India that the future status of Kashmir is in dispute. Does he realise what scrapping the Simla accord would mean? It would lead us straight back to the instrument of accession. That instrument places the whole of Jammu and Kashmir, including Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), squarely in India. Pakistan can claim that this is subject to a plebiscite. But the plebiscite would have to be held in the whole of Kashmir and under the uncip resolutions of August 28, 1948, and April 12, 1949, both of which Pakistan accepted, it would have to vacate the whole of PoK and allow an Indian presence in it before the plebiscite can be held.

Nor is that all. No matter what the UN resolutions say, after 51 years, it is exceedingly doubtful whether Kashmir can be treated like a piece of luggage and given only the options of acceding to Pakistan or India. If a plebiscite is the answer, should it not be a three-way choice-the third being independence? In an 8,000-word interview, Musharraf does not mention this possibility even once.

From this one must conclude that Musharraf’s purpose in urging talks that begin with a tabula rasa is to carve up Kashmir between Pakistan and India by mutual consent. It cannot, however, be on the basis of the LoC, because had that been acceptable, the entire dispute would have been over long ago.

This brings me to the third contradiction. For, just suppose that an agreement were reached that gave independence to the Valley, or a three-way plebiscite after a cooling off period of several years (which would also normally lead to independence)-if Pakistan is not behind the infiltration taking place today, then who will guarantee peace after the agreement is reached? The answer is, of course, in the famous Musharraf tapes of May 1999.

So why then is Musharraf so keen to address India and ask for a new dialogue on Kashmir? One reason could be the propaganda value of his statements in the capitals of the OECD countries. But another is his growing awareness that the Pakistani state is on the brink of failure. Its economy is a shambles. In 1997, 71 per cent of the federal revenues was absorbed by interest payments on past debt. Debt servicing and civil servants’ salaries swallowed the entire revenue, leaving nothing for education, infrastructure and social spending. The military budget, amounting to 36 per cent of revenues and 27 per cent of federal expenditure, is funded by borrowing from the household sector. That is pushing up the national debt and the share of debt servicing in the annual budget still further. Pakistan is thus caught squarely in a debt trap. Civil society is being torn apart by the proliferation of private Islamic militias. But this too is a product of the state’s preoccupation with Kashmir, India and its own militarisation. For, the gap left in public education has been filled by elite private schools on the one hand and by madrasas and deen-i-madaris, which teach little other than the Quran, on the other.

One does not have to project these trends far to see the failed state that lies at the end. Not many years hence, debt servicing could consume 90 per cent of federal revenues. With almost 400,000 students in the deen-i-madaris, Islamic fundamentalism can only grow and it is but natural that a large proportion of these students will end up in the army and Islamise it further. The only way out is to cut back military spending drastically. But to do that, he must first get a solution in Kashmir that the military can regard as a victory and a vindication of Pakistan’s Islamic raison d’etre.