Is Pakistan ready to carry forward a new conversation started by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
When Pakistan’s former President Pervez Musharraf first met India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2004, he declared that the two could resolve long-standing differences between their countries within minutes if they applied their mind to it in right earnest. Dr Singh smiled and cautioned the General, “I am not a soldier, General Saheb, and I am much older. I cannot run like you. Let me walk step by step.”
Walk they did for several months, “creating a road by walking”, as Dr Singh put it at a banquet he hosted in April 2005 in New Delhi. Eventually, it was the General who ran out of steam.
At Thimpu last April, Dr Singh changed track. Meeting his counterpart after the disruption caused by the Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008 and the Sharm-el-Sheikh misadventure of July 2009, Prime Minister Singh and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani opted for a “conversation” rather than a dialogue. No joint statements, no declarations. Just a quiet conversation to find a way forward, mindful of all the pitfalls and the potential threats to the process.
Clearly, Dr Singh is not ready to give up on Pakistan even if many people in both countries still view each other with extreme distrust. The evolution of his thinking is captured by half a dozen speeches delivered between November 2004, weeks after his first meeting with President Musharraf, and December 2006, weeks after the two met in Havana for an extended one-to-one conversation (All speeches are available at www.pmindia.nic.in).
The first time Dr Singh revealed his “new thinking” on the bilateral relationship, with a focus on Kashmir, was in a November 2004 convocation address at the Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences. While referring to the building of a “naya Kashmir” he said, “I have come today to Kashmir not with a ‘package’ but with a ‘plan’. A plan to reconstruct the economy, reform the Government, regenerate entrepreneurship, revitalise the institutions of civil society and redefine the political paradigm and context in the sub-continent” (emphasis ours).
He followed this up the same week with a speech at the Indira Gandhi Conference where he spoke at length about how he saw India developing in the next decade. He ended with the words: “If this is the India we build at home, it will find itself in a new world. The world will look anew at us. Our neighbours will find us more welcoming and will welcome us more warmly. Over the next decade I would like to see India living in a neighbourhood of shared prosperity and peace. I would like to see India even more actively engaged with all of Asia and all of the Indian Ocean region. I would like India to be actively engaged with the world’s major powers in all international forums participating willingly in the preservation of peace, protection of the environment and the creation of prosperity.”
His next important statement on India-Pakistan relations was in the Lok Sabha on March 10, 2005, which I quoted in my last column (“Manmohan Singh bats again”, March 28). This was followed by his welcome remarks to President Musharraf in April 2005 when he said, after entering all the caveats about Pakistan stopping all manner of support to anti-India terrorism emanating from Pakistan, “Our people and our common destiny urge us to make an earnest attempt to find a lasting solution to all issues. In a globalising and increasingly integrated world, borders have lost meaning for much of the world. The journey of peace must be based on a step-by-step approach, but the road must be travelled. As an ancient saying goes, a road is made by walking.” In saying “a road is made by walking” Dr Singh opened up the possibility of new possibilities.
How far that dialogue had got within a year is captured by a March 2006 speech in Amritsar in which Dr Singh offered Pakistan a “Treaty of Peace, Security and Friendship” stating, “I have often said that borders cannot be redrawn but we can work towards making them irrelevant — towards making them just lines on a map. People on both sides of the LOC [line of control] should be able to move more freely and trade with one another. I also envisage a situation where the two parts of Jammu & Kashmir can, with the active encouragement of the governments of India and Pakistan, work out cooperative, consultative mechanisms so as to maximise the gains of cooperation in solving problems of social and economic development of the region.”
In January 2007, Dr Singh said in his address at the Annual General Meeting of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry in New Delhi, “In the increasingly globalised and integrated world we live in, political borders are no longer economic and social barriers. I dream of a day when, while retaining our respective national identities, one can have breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Kabul. That is how my forefathers lived. That is how I want our grandchildren to live.”
This grand vision, and the idea of a treaty, was punctured by the terror attacks in Mumbai in November 2008 and the developments in Pakistan. In retrospect, Mr Musharraf’s early enthusiasm was clearly ill-considered, and Dr Singh’s “step-by-step” approach has endured.
Mr Gilani, however, is a politician who seems to recognise the merit of this approach and of a “conversation”, rather than a “dialogue”. However, it is still not clear if Mr Gilani can carry his army leadership along, and can prevent hotheads in his country from sabotaging the process.
Conversations between implacable adversaries, especially nuclear-armed neighbours, are necessary, important and useful. Is Pakistan willing to carry forward the conversation? Perhaps Dr Singh should undertake an early visit to Pakistan to find out.
