[From: DAWN, 21 Feb 1999 ]
The bus can bring a Nobel prizeBy Eqbal Ahmad
MR Atal Behari Vajpayee's bus journey to Lahore is unquestionably a historic event. Nevertheless, a question remains: will the two prime ministers make history? If they do, they would most likely win the next year's Nobel Prize for peace and, more importantly, will be remembered as among the great statesmen of our time.
They make an unlikely pair of peacemakers. India's 73-year-old prime minister has been for all his adult life an activist, then leader in the RSS, a militant wing of the Hindu nationalist movement. Making peace with Pakistan has never been his party's preference. Furthermore, he leads a shaky and cantankerous coalition, a fact that renders decision making arduous and risky.
His Pakistani counterpart too is linked to conservative constituencies. Punjab's landed gentry has been traditionally hawkish. The military, drawn largely from Punjab, is distrustful of India and wary of how the end of Pakistan's hostility with it would affect the country's standing and its own institutional future. The "national security" establishment in both countries regard normalization of relations between the two states as nothing short of national disaster. Even a significant portion of Pakistan's business community, to which Mr. Sharif belongs, worries about the costs to it of freer trade with India. Both prime ministers confront a vocal and violent minority opposed to Indo-Pakistan detente. As against these, logic, wisdom, and popular sentiment favour their mission.
It is not uncommon for conservative leaders to accomplish what liberal and reputedly enlightened ones fail to do. French socialists, among them Mendes France and Guy Mollet, did not end the very savage warfare in Algeria. Charles de Gaulle did. He was brought to power by a revolt of the hardliners who were determined to keep Algeria French, and became the unlikely dismantler of France's empire in Africa. Richard Nixon made his political career as an anti-communist crusader. At one point during the Korean war he openly advocated the use of nuclear weapons against China. As a Congressman, then as vice-president he spewed fiery vitriol against the Chinese government and leaders. Yet he was the first American president to visit China and regarded the re-establishment of US relations with the Peoples Republic as the greatest achievement of his presidency. A.B. Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif may well be the latest among those unlikely peacemakers.
The timing of their meeting is propitious. The nuclear tests of May 1998 have underlined the great risk in continuing hostility between neighbours barely three minutes from Armageddon. A mutually agreed set of rules on safety, deployment and warning is now a requirement for preventing thermo-nuclear holocaust by accident, individual madness, or miscalculation. Possession of nuclear capability by both countries has yielded a security environment characterized by deterrence so that neither side can contemplate war, a point underlined on Siachen Heights by Pakistan's Chief of Army Staff.
But the assumption of deterrence produces new temptations and raises the risks of miscalculating the other side's forbearance. As a new nuclear power the United States behaved criminally once when it bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The second time it miscalculated the effectiveness of deterrence and ordered its armed forces to cross the 38th parallel in Korea. The miscalculation cost a milllion lives and a stalemate that continues to this day. The third miscalculation occurred in Vietnam where its repeated nuclear blackmail failed to break either the Vietnamese morale or the Soviet and Chinese support for it.
In two of the three instances the US paid a high price for its miscalculations. Washington recognized the value of "detente" only after its Vietnam debacle. The management of deterrence demands a new logic of caution, a limit on ambition, removal of ideological blinders, a lowering of tension and taming of hostilities. Many commentators have emphasized the need for a regime of nuclear restraint. Good, but not enough! As the cold war amply showed, nuclear deterrence raises the temptation to 'low intensity warfare', a lethal game that can spell doom in both India and Pakistan. The bus diplomacy allows one to hope that in less than a year after the nuclear tests Indian and Pakistani leaders are sensing the risks which American policy makers took decades to comprehend.
It could not be happening in a more deserving region. At least half of South Asia's more than one billion people barely subsist. More than half are illiterate and do not have access to potable water. These legatees of great civilizations are today among the most wretched on earth. They deserve to be given life and raised to the level of humanity. And this is not possible without regional cooperation, without a change in priorities from bullets to bread. At a recent international conference in Delhi delegates from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal repeatedly remarked that there was desperate need for open trade and regional cooperation in South Asia, yet it was blocked by the squabble between India and Pakistan. "We are all hostages to your hostilities", said a Nepalese scholar.
"Will the bus trip lead to peace?" many people ask in Delhi. 'Let us hope' was all one could say. There are reasons to hope. The first is that the two prime ministers are serious men. Occasionally, they get serious about the wrong thing, such as Hindutva or the Fifteenth Amendment. But in this case they appear to be seriously wanting to do the right thing. Secondly, personal likes and dislikes matter in negotiations. Those who know them well say that Messrs Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif have developed a rather great fondness for each other, are inclined to comprehend each other's viewpoint, recognize each other's domestic constraints, and trust each other's intentions. "I have seen both together and I have talked to each separately", said one insider, "and found the chemistry between them to be unusually positive." If each believes that the other is sincere about peacemaking, they may well make progress beyond the symbolism of bus ride, buggy ride and Moghul pomp in Lahore.
The domestic environment is also favourable in both countries. The euphoria over the nuclear tests has worn out. Its economic costs are being felt, and its risks have begun to be understood. Hence, the promise of progress in Indo-Pakistan relations has caught the popular imagination. Welcoming youths drowned out the Jamaat-i-Islami protesters against the test run of the Delhi-Lahore bus service. Frowns and condemnations greeted the Shiv Sena's messing up of the cricket pitch in Delhi.
The start of the test series was widely welcome. Both governments ignored the provocations and carried on with the plans for the bus and the test matches. The test match fans in Chennai were friendly, received an honour lap from the visiting team, and gave the victorious Pakistanis a standing ovation. On the eve of Mr. Vajpayee's bus trip this visitor in Delhi finds the Indian press and people anticipating the outcome with enthusiasm and anticipation.
In fact, hopes on both sides are high. It is significant that despite the loud nay sayers of the right, the main opposition parties in India and Pakistan have welcomed the Indo-Pakistan summit. Yet, if the bus diplomacy fails to match its spectacular symbolism with a modicum of substance, it can produce disillusionment and reversals.
It is not realistic to expect substantive agreements on longstanding disputes. Diplomatic summits produce processes not treaties. At best they yield broad indications of intent, the guidelines for foreign ministers and secretaries who negotiate the details. One hopes though that in this instance the officials of the two countries will have done some preparatory work to give meaning to this dramatic event. They had the material to work with. An agreement was reached in 1992 to end the absurd military confrontation in the Siachen Glacier area. At the last foreign secretary level meetings, hitches were introduced to prevent a final agreement. These could be ironed out. Similarly, broad agreements exist on the Wullar Barrage and Sir Creek salient. Agreement on these would signal a determination by both sides to set aside petty details for the sake of achieving a broad peace.
A great reservoir for peace lies in the historical and cultural affinities between the people of India and Pakistan. The prime ministers' meeting will gain in significance to the extent that they decide to feed this reservoir. Travel between the two countries needs to be made easier, and the unnecessary humiliations of police reporting ought to be spared the travellers. An agreement on reopening the Indian and Pakistani consulates in Bombay and Karachi, and on resuming the rail link through Rajasthan will bring much relief to millions of people. Above all, meaningful beginnings must be made toward enlarging commerce and cultural exchanges between the two countries. The prime ministers are not likely to announce the specifics of such agreements. But they can draw the outlines of the map they wish the technicians and diplomats to fill out.
The question of Kashmir will of course stand as the great obstacle to a final peace between India and Pakistan. It is nearly impossible for Messrs. Nawaz Sharif and Atal Behari Vajpayee to reach an agreement over this thorny dispute. What they can do, however, is to appreciate each other's perspectives, try to link those with Kashmiri aspirations, and begin the process of searching for the alternatives that lie between fixed, by now outdated, positions.
But what will matter most is the spirit with which they lay the foundations of future Indo-Pakistan relations. In a front page article, India's daily The Hindu quotes Sardar Jafri's lines: Tum aao gulshan-i-Lahore se chaman bardosh, Ham aayen subh-i-Banaras ki roshni laykar: Phir uskay baad yeh poochcheyn key kon dushman hai! (You come wearing the fragrance of Lahore, We bring you the warmth of the morning in Banaras: And then let's ask "who is the enemy!")
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