One example of this asymmetry is that India had given Pakistan most favoured nation (MFN) trading status as far back as 1995, and Pakistan has still not reciprocated. It remains the only example on the entire planet of a one-sided MFN; no other country has ever refused to reciprocate an offer of MFN trading status from a neighbour. (In 2011, Pakistan announced it would finally extend MFN status to India, but the enabling legislation and the necessary regulations were yet to be written twelve months after the announcement.) India continues to show its good faith time after time, persisting in the peace talks even after the Kabul embassy bombing, offering aid after natural disasters in Pakistan (in one egregious instance, aid of $25 million offered by India in the wake of severe floods in Pakistan was initially rejected by Islamabad, which finally, grudgingly said it would be glad to have the money if given through the United Nations rather than directly). In the summer of 2009, when the country was still in a boil over the prime minister’s visit to Sharm el Sheikh, the Indian team played the Pakistani team at a charity cricket match in England, with the proceeds going to the relief of displaced people from Swat in Pakistan — every penny being sent to the very country from which terrorists had attacked India just a few months previously. So the goodwill and the heart of India should not and cannot be doubted. It is unfortunately not being matched from the other side. There is no equivalent example that Pakistan can cite.
Then the Pakistani side’s tendency to equate the two countries’ experience of terrorism—‘We are bigger victims of terrorism than you are,’ one visitor said; ‘If you can cite Mumbai, we can point at Samjhauta,’ added another — omitted the basic difference that no one from India has crossed the border to inflict mayhem on Pakistan. Indians can and should sympathize with Pakistani victims of terrorism, but their tragedy is home-grown, an evil force turning on its creator; whereas Indians have died because killers from Pakistan, trained, equipped and directed by Pakistanis, have travelled to our country to kill, maim and destroy. There is no moral equivalence, and to pretend there is builds the dialogue on a platform of falsehood.
Finally, friendship has to be built on a shared perception of the danger — of a sincere acceptance by the Pakistani military establishment that those who attacked the Taj in Mumbai are just as much their enemies as those bombing the Marriott in Islamabad. This would require more than fuzzy words from parliamentarians — it needs genuine cooperation from Pakistan, including useful information-sharing and real action to arrest, prosecute and punish the perpetrators. The Samjhauta plotters are in jail in India, while Hafiz Saeed is still at large in Pakistan, preaching hatred.
If Islamabad genuinely shared the Manmohan Singh vision that the highest strategic interest of both countries lies in development and the eradication of poverty rather than in military one-upmanship, we could cooperate across the board, most obviously in trade — which would be of immense benefit to both countries, including certainly to a Pakistan that currently pays a premium for Indian goods imported via Dubai, and which also needs to gain export access to the gigantic Indian market for everything from its surplus cement to sporting goods. (It is hard to remember, today, that six decades ago the majority of Pakistan’s trade was with India.) Normal trade relations could also be a precursor to the easing of geopolitical tensions. Until then, Track-II initiatives will feel good, but will remain on the wrong track.
What, then, is the way forward for India? It is clear that we want peace more than Pakistan does, because we have more at stake when peace is violated. To those who suggest that we should simply ignore our dysfunctional neighbours, accept the occasional terrorist blast (and prevent the ones we can), tell ourselves there is nothing we need from Pakistan and try to get on with our development free of the incubus of that benighted land, there is only one answer: we cannot grow and prosper without peace, and that is the one thing Pakistan can give us that we cannot do without. We cannot choose to be uninterested in Pakistan, because Pakistan is dangerously interested in us. By denying us the peace we crave, Pakistan can undermine our vital national interests, above all that of our own development. Investors shun war zones; traders are wary of markets that might explode at any time; tourists do not travel to hotels that might be commandeered by crazed terrorists. These are all serious hazards for a country seeking to grow and flourish in a globalizing world economy. Even if Pakistan cannot do us much good, it can do us immense harm, and we must recognize this in formulating our policy approaches to it. Foreign policy cannot be built on a sense of betrayal any more than it can be on illusions of love. Pragmatism dictates that we work for peace with Pakistan precisely so that we can serve our own people’s needs better.
But we must do this without illusions, without deceiving ourselves about the existence of genuine partners for peace across the border, and without being taken in by the insincere press releases of the civilian rulers who are occasionally allowed to don the masks of power in Pakistan. We must accept that the very nature of the Pakistani state condemns us to facing an implacable enemy in the self-perpetuating military elite next door, for lasting peace would leave them without a raison d’être for their power and their privileges. We must not be deluded into making concessions, whether on Kashmir or any other issue, in the naive expectation that these would end the hostility of the ISI and its cohorts. We must understand that Pakistan’s fragile sense of self-worth rests on its claim to be superior to India, stronger and more valiant than India, richer and more capable than India. This is why the killers of 26/11 struck the places they did, because their objective was not only to kill and destroy, but also to pull down India’s growth, tarnish its success story and darken its lustre in the world. The more we grow and flourish in the world, the more difficult we make it for the Pakistani military to sustain its myth of superiority or even parity. There are malignant forces in Islamabad who see their future resting upon India’s failure. These are not motives we can easily overcome.
This means that talking to plausible civilians has severe limitations. A smooth president, a bluff prime minister or a glamorous foreign minister makes for good television, but behind their affability they are each aware that a step too far could make them the targets of their own military establishment. We should be aware of this too, and we should ensure they are aware that we are aware. And yet we must engage Pakistan because we cannot afford not to. For even if we are talking to people who do not have the ultimate power to call off the killers, we know that their military overlords are listening, and that in the complicated arabesque that is Islamabad’s civilian — military relationship, some of our messaging will get through to those who need to hear it.
As these words are written in March of 2012, it does seem that a subtle shift may be occurring in the atmospherics surrounding one of the most intractable problems of recent years, the dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. The Pakistani military may have once thought that the fomenting of militancy and terrorism in India was an effective strategy of hurting the enemy on the cheap, but civilians in Islamabad have increasingly begun to realize (and to express the view) that Pakistan may have become the biggest victim of its own Kashmir policy. Its legacy has left the country with a distorted polity where the military has conducted four coups and is used to calling the shots behind the scenes; a collapsing economy, high unemployment and raging inflation; and a large number of unemployed and undereducated young men radicalized by years of Islamist propaganda against the Indian infidel. The result is a combustible mixture that threatens to consume the Pakistani state, with terrorists once sponsored by Islamabad now turning on their erstwhile patrons.