Ejaz Haider, whose riposte to Aatish Taseer had sparked my initial piece, was less accommodating of my core argument, seeing it as an exercise in ‘considered perception-formation and reinforcement’. By this he seemed to imply that my article was part of a devious Indian conspiracy to affect perceptions of his country negatively; in fact he titled his column ‘It’s Not Just Mr. Tharoor!’ My fellow conspirators (on the basis of recent articles we had each written) apparently included young Taseer, the Mumbai-born American strategist Ashley Tellis and the Indian analyst Nitin Pai, who has suggested (as I have done separately) that the United States should end its overgenerous aid to Pakistan’s military — jihadi complex. Ejaz Haider then proceeds to put words in our collective mouths to the tune that we seek ‘India’s supremacy in the region’ and the resolution of disputes only ‘on India’s terms’. None of us has made so fatuous a suggestion, but the exaggeration was, alas, necessary to demolish our case.
Then Ejaz Haider (who, it must be said, is one of Pakistan’s finest columnists, and whom I have enjoyed reading for years) got on to firmer ground. He admitted that there is a military — civilian divide in Pakistan, but argued that most of his country’s conflicts with India have originated under, or at the instigation of, civilian politicians, not military rulers. In any case, this is ‘Pakistan’s internal matter’ and acknowledging it should not imply any neglect of national security or abdication of Pakistani self-interest. And the clincher: ‘we don’t need advice from across the border’ (especially, he adds gratuitously, from pundits who ‘crawled on their bellies’ during the Emergency, a charge from which all those he was responding to are in fact exempt).
Ejaz Haider was joined in the pages of Pakistan’s Express Tribune by Feisal Naqvi, who found my arguments ‘cretinous in the extreme’ and ‘gratuitously smug about India’s lack of strategic ambitions’. Invective aside, Naqvi’s argument was that while Pakistanis were obsessed with India, ‘the opposite of India-obsessed is not India-submissive’ (which, again putting words into my mouth, I allegedly want them to be). Mr Naqvi also finds, somewhere between the lines of my column, something I never wrote — a rejection of the very legitimacy of Pakistan’s existence. Pakistani liberals, he asserts, are happy being Pakistani, value their military and have no desire to dismantle it. My article instead ‘delegitimizes’ them in the eyes of the Pakistani establishment. (Sigh.)
What was particularly interesting about these well-written responses is that they relied principally on refuting arguments I haven’t made. I am totally reconciled to Pakistan’s existence as an independent state, and have no desire to reintegrate it into a pre-Partition ‘Akhand Bharat’—indeed, the demographic, social and political evolution of Pakistan since 1947 makes it quite unsuitable for any such reabsorption. I do understand that Pakistan has to survive in a tough neighbourhood and it needs a capable military. And I do not expect any Pakistani government, military or civilian, to act in anything but Pakistan’s own best interest.
But — and alas, there is a but — I don’t believe it is in Pakistan’s best interest to be the country whose armed forces consume the largest percentage of national income of any military in the world. I don’t believe it is in Pakistan’s best interest to adopt a policy of seeking ‘strategic depth’ by destabilizing its neighbours. I don’t believe it is in Pakistan’s best interest to try to wrest Kashmir from India by fair means or foul. I don’t believe it is in Pakistan’s best interest to be the cradle and crucible of militant Islamist terrorism. I don’t believe it is in Pakistan’s best interest to be a country where no elected civilian government has ever served a full term. And I do believe that any Pakistani liberal worth the name (take a bow, Marvi Sirmed) should have no difficulty in agreeing with any of these propositions.
Even if they come from an Indian. Ay, there’s the rub …
The same problem surfaced, in different guise, a few weeks later, when New Delhi played host to a visiting delegation of Pakistani parliamentarians, brought to India by an enterprising Islamabad NGO called PILDAT (Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency). Few things in international affairs are more agreeable, all round, than the non-official dialogues diplomats refer to as ‘Track-II’. But for all its non-official character, this was a high-powered delegation, including a vice-chairman of the Pakistani Senate, a deputy speaker, former ministers and a serving information secretary of the ruling party. On India’s side of the parliamentary border, the meeting was co-chaired, in a commendably bipartisan spirit, by a former Congress party minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar, and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s last foreign minister, Yashwant Sinha. I was, without quite intending to be it, the only dissident.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m all in favour of Indo-Pak peace and bonhomie. I’ve seen a lot of it in my decades abroad — many is the time a Pakistani cab driver in New York has attempted to decline my money for the fare, saying that I was a brother (this of course always won him a bigger tip, but the spirit was genuine). Indians and Pakistanis overseas are almost always the best of friends, since being in foreign lands enhances their consciousness of what they have in common, which vastly exceeds what divides them. I would love to see a time when Pakistanis and Indians can cross each other’s borders with the insouciance of Americans and Canadians, work in each other’s countries, trade freely with each other and contribute equally to each other’s films, music, clothing and creative lives, just as they did before 1947. I would be happy if that time came sooner rather than later. But, sadly, I am only too aware that it’s not now.
The problem with Indo-Pak Track-II dialogues of the kind I witnessed in the capital is that they are essentially built on denial. They focus on making the visitors feel welcome, emphasize the feel-good aspects of their presence in our midst, celebrate the many things we have in common and try to brush the real problems under a carpet (not a Kashmiri carpet, since that might provoke disagreeable thoughts). In other words, they are a self-fulfilling exercise in self-vindication. Their success depends on denying the very disagreements that makes such dialogues necessary in the first place.
The event began with a somewhat odd opening panel discussion, where members of the audience rounded on the moderator, News X’s Jehangir Pocha, for moderately raising some real questions, when his job had apparently been intended to be to orchestrate a paean of pious homilies to peace and brotherhood. So when I took the floor late in the next morning’s session, I had been fairly warned. But after listening to several bromides from parliamentarians of both nationalities, I felt a dose of candour was necessary. So I pointed out that there were some genuine obstacles to be overcome if the peace and love we were all affirming was in fact to take root, rather than briefly blossom in the illusory sunshine of Track II. And those obstacles all lay in Pakistan.
First, India has long been in favour of placing the Kashmir dispute on the back burner and promoting trade, travel and the rest; it is Pakistan that has taken the view that there cannot be normal relations with India until Kashmir is settled, on terms acceptable to Islamabad. So inasmuch as there is hostility that such dialogues attempt to overcome, the hostility starts with Pakistan, which wants a change in the territorial status quo, and not with India, which is perfectly content to leave things as they are. Unless the Pakistani MPs present were willing to advocate a policy of across-the-board engagement with India despite the lack of a solution to the Kashmir dispute, our words would be just so much hot air.