ENGAGING PAKISTAN

Satyabrata Pal

Over the last sixty-two years, the two-nation theory has become a self-fulfilling
prophecy. In Pakistan, all memories of a shared past, and of cultures not
Islamic, have been wiped clean. Its history is taught as a hop, skip and jump –
a hop, nose held, into Mohenjodaro, a relieved skip to Muslim rule, then a
frantic jump to Jinnah and the creation of Pakistan. Which is a metaphor for
Pakistan’s life as well: it soars for a bit but ends up on its rump in a sandpit.

Indians who hope that, taking partition as a given, we can forget its trauma and
remember that we were one people for ages, miss the crucial point that we now
have very little in common. Punjabis share a language but India and Pakistan
have gone their separate ways. IT, with which the world identifies us both,
illustrates the gulf between us; for Pakistan the IT is international terrorism, its
it-girls are suicide bombers in burqas. A state without an ethos is being snared
by an ethos without a state, the Qaid giving way to Qaeda.

What is Pakistan? Jinnah thought it was born moth-eaten. Then the behemoth
of the army sucked Pakistan into its maw. What the moths and behemoths left
the mosques gnawed to the bone. Now the madrassas gobble down the gristle.
What started out as a diseased fancy, dreamt up by a poet, coughed up by a
consumptive, has turned into a nightmare.

Pakistan has made a horrible mess of itself, almost as if, because it wants to be
the antithesis of India, it must embrace failure if India is a success. So it sinks
into hell, rises into chaos, and many Indians gloat over its agony as the wages
of sin. It is easy to hate Pakistan, even easier now to sneer at it, but loathing
cannot form policy, any more than an unrequited love can. Sadly, though,
policy on Pakistan is often made either by the raptors or the rapt.

The raptors – the hawks of Lutyens Delhi – are fearful pests, rising on hot air to
great heights, where they go around in circles and shriek. But ask what India
should do, and the hawk on Pakistan turns out to be not the hawk of falconry,
but of the hawk-and-spit, expectoration passed off as policy, or of the hawk-
and-sell, the devious flogging of the shoddy and the squalid. Cursed with both
a north and a south block, it is dense and costive, so nothing goes in and
nothing comes out. If the hawk has its reasons, reason cannot understand them.

______________________________________
“Engaging Pakistan”: India Quarterly, Volume 4, 2009
We must, though, try to understand Pakistan, gauge what it can do for us,
which is very little, what it can do to us, which is quite a lot, and craft policy
accordingly. As our national priority is development, for which we need
investment, trade and technology, where Pakistan has nothing to offer, the
hawks say we should simply shut it out, and focus on growth. If only we could;
we cannot grow without peace, which Pakistan can and does deny us. Trade
and investment drop on the threat of war, tourism plummets after every major
terrorist attack. So Pakistan’s ability to help us is infinitesimal, its ability to
harm us is infinite. It is a constant threat.

The threat comes from the Pakistan Army, which straddles its country like an
incubus. A few liberals might jib, but most Pakistanis seem happy to be ridden.
Perhaps this is because the Punjab dominates Pakistan, the army is mostly
Punjabi, proud that they formed the bulk of the regiments with which the
British ruled India, and steeped in the belief that Pakistani civilians, like
“Hindu India”, are untermensch, over whom soldiers have a divine right to rule.
The Punjab finds it hard to rebel against its boys, because it also buys the
argument that the army is the dyke that holds back the Hindu tide, which would
flood over them first. Better, in this view, to be hostages of the army than
handmaidens of the Indians.

The Pakistan Army claims to run Pakistan because it is the only institution
there that runs. The cynical view in India might be that experience in three
wars confirms that the Pakistan Army does run, quickly and backward, which is
where it has taken Pakistan. But if Pakistanis let these uniformed sprinters run
over them, there is nothing we can do about it, or about the complexes – over
manhood, identity and inferiority – for which their Army tries to compensate.
As in the confessional comicality of its buying North Korean missiles called No
Dong and giving them Afghan names – Ghori, Ghazni and Abdali – to cover a
purely Pakistani inadequacy.

Assuming that this Army will not want to risk war, the threat we will face is
from terrorism, as it has been for many years. But though terrorism from
Pakistan has been a constant, its motives have changed over the years. In the
90s, the aim was to get India to cede Kashmir or negotiate on it, and terrorism
was confined to J&K. That is the primary motive now only for groups like the
Jaish-e-Mohammed and their backers in the ISI. It is a subsidiary motive for
groups like the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, which command more mainstream support
in the Army.

______________________________________
“Engaging Pakistan”: India Quarterly, Volume 4, 2009 Page |2
For the Pakistan Army now, Kashmir is a secondary objective. The primary
objective is to arrest India’s growth, for two reasons, both to do with Pakistan’s
forlorn quest for parity. Firstly, our success when Pakistan is going down the
tubes shatters the myth, spun by the Army, that Pakistan can always best India.
And, more practically, the more we grow, the harder it is for Pakistan to match
our military expenditure, or our influence in the world.

So the nature of the targets has changed. Instead of the Valley, which is now
relatively quiet, terrorists hit technology hubs like Bangalore and Hyderabad,
financial and entertainment centres like Mumbai, tourist spots like Jaipur, and
the capital. Their task is to damage the sectors that drive India’s success:
technology, trade, tourism, Bollywood. If India, like Pakistan, is seen as
unsafe, tourism will dry up, investors will go elsewhere, trade will be diverted,
and so on. The plan seemed to work after Mumbai, and because it is so cost-
effective, it will be tried again. This has nothing to do with Kashmir, it has
everything to do with the opposed trajectories Pakistan and India are on. As
Pakistan plumbs the depths, its Army does its best to stop India rising.

From 2008, as the PPP came to power, the Pakistan Army also began to use
terrorism to protect its power, its special privileges, and the wealth of its
generals, which depend on its being able to pull the strings of civilian puppets.
In turn, this depends on its being able to convince Pakistanis that there is a
mortal threat to them from India, which only the Army can stave off. Peace,
except on its terms, threatens its institutional interests, which for it are
paramount. When Asif Zardari said last year that peace was a must, because
Pakistan’s future lay in “being a force-multiplier for India”, he was, for his
Army, thinking and saying the unthinkable. Its response was also the hitherto
unthinkable – the attack on our Embassy in Kabul, which stopped Zardari’s
initiative in its tracks.

So, while the Pakistan Army first used terrorism, and still does, to coerce India,
now it is warning its own government that it will not brook hobnobbing with
India, unless its interests are protected. In this avatar of terrorism, the civilian
government of the state that is the sponsor is as much a target as the victim is.

The challenge India faces from Pakistani terrorism is therefore unique. The
objectives of terrorism elsewhere are narrow. Even Al Qaeda, which seems to
have the entire non-Islamic world in its sights, attacks the West to protect Islam
from alien values; if the Ummah is left to Al Qaeda, it will leave the motherless
world alone, or so we are led to believe. But the more we leave Pakistan alone,
______________________________________
“Engaging Pakistan”: India Quarterly, Volume 4, 2009 Page |3
and behind, the more its Army will use terrorism to slow us down and to drag
us back into its fatal embrace. Ignoring Pakistan is not an option, because
Pakistan will not ignore us. We hate the hyphen with Pakistan, it clings to it
like a straw. That is its mooring; take that away, and Pakistan drops into the
abyss. So we find ourselves partitioned but not separated. Terrorism joins us
at the hip to Pakistan, like Siamese twins, and we can cut ourselves away only
with its consent.

Foolish voices whisper that terrorism is a game two can play; it is not, even if
our agency does cloak-and-dagger as well as theirs, and they are as like as the
raw and the uncooked. The Pakistan Army would like nothing better than to
drag us down into its cesspit. It has nothing to lose, we have everything. Best
to concede that no one does terrorism like Pakistan, and we cannot match it.
Nor can we force it to reform.

This is hard to accept, so we ask mutual friends to get it to behave, which is

bizarre, because when Pakistan begs its patrons to lean on us, we sniff that it
has broken the Simla Agreement. And it is futile, because the West and the
Ummah need Pakistan, as they do not need India; they will not force it to abjure
terrorism against India, which does not hurt them. Pakistan mugs us, we make
it look like a duel, appoint our friends the referees, and let them cajole us to
give it satisfaction.

If Pakistan is unfaithful to Simla, what we commit is a chaste rape. We must

instead act on the logic of what we say: if we believe “internationalization”
hurts our interests, and bilateralism protects them, we have no option but to
engage Pakistan, no matter how hard that seems, and without assuming that
engagement means either a battle or a betrothal.

Those who say that Pakistan will only behave if we bring it under international
pressure, as we have after Mumbai, point out that there has been no major
incident since then. But since, barring the odd meeting, we have also refused to
talk, the terrorism has worked; there is no imminent danger of peace, so there
has been no need of more terrorism. With the world in recession, the India
success story has also been muted, so here too, another strike was redundant. If
a prophylactic dose is working, a second is unnecessary. The threat will return
when the recession ebbs, the effects of the bombings of 2008 wear off, and
India takes off again.

______________________________________
“Engaging Pakistan”: India Quarterly, Volume 4, 2009 Page |4
We cannot meet this threat if we accept the myth that it is the ISI, or a rogue
element within it, not the Army as a whole, that promotes terrorism. The ISI
may well be Pakistan’s answer to the Holy Roman Empire, which was neither
holy, Roman nor an empire: it has no intelligence, it does Pakistan no service
and will in time inter it. But it is not independent; it is a wing of the Army,
whose interests it serves. If the Army is again firing at the LOC to help push
in the ISI’s jihadis, as it had not in the twilight of Musharraf’s rule, it is not on
DG ISI’s orders; he does not control troops, the Corps Commanders do. If the
DG ISI went to our High Commissioner’s iftar this year to break the ice, more
than his fast, it was because he was ordered to.

We should not dismiss the significance of this gesture, because for years,
whenever we have had stand-offs, the Pakistan Army and we have both been
apprehensive about a thaw; we have waited for the snows to melt, the Army for
the ice. We feared the jihadis would follow, the Pakistan Army peace.

We must therefore try to persuade the Pakistan Army that peace will not harm
it. There are three steps we might take. Firstly, we should not try to drive a
wedge between Pakistanis and their soldiers. Pakistani politicians who win
elections have been as hostile as generals who lose wars; for us, neta neti, as it
were, neither this leader nor that. And nothing unites Pakistanis behind their
military like our criticism, so, even if we think civilian control of the Army
would help us, it is best not to say so.

Secondly, we should stop vapouring every time Pakistan seeks new weapons.
The oceans of diplomatic effort and credit we spent did not stop the US giving
Pakistan the F-16, the Harpoon and the P-3, and these did not lead to war.
Force-multipliers like these are systems for the air force and navy; there are
very few in land warfare, and even if military intelligence is a contradiction in
terms, the Pakistan Army is not suicidal. It knows it has no edge and knows
better than to start a war. It just wants its toys, and will get them, from the US
on an apron-string, from China with no strings attached. We should take this as
a given, and an excuse for our generals to get more playthings of their own.
We should not feed the anxiety in the Pakistan Army that, if there is peace,
India will urge, with greater plausibility, that no new arms should be sold to
them.

______________________________________
“Engaging Pakistan”: India Quarterly, Volume 4, 2009 Page |5
Thirdly, the Army has to be nudged into realizing that peace pays. This was
beginning to register in 2007, when we started to import cement, and
companies run by the Army won the biggest contracts, piquantly helping to
build the new India. Which showed that the generals would wink even at this,
provided they are the ones who profit. They might, just might, tolerate peace if
they can still batten on Pakistan, and grow fat on trade with India.

We must start now, because the leadership of the Pakistan Army is becoming
more doctrinaire. Zia recruited officers from the vernacular schools and the
lower middle classes, with toxic piety a major factor in selection, reinforced by
indoctrination and service in three decades of jihad in Afghanistan. They come
from the social background that the jihadis trawl, and share their views. These
dragon’s teeth that Zia sowed are now brigadiers; they will soon be the Corps
Commanders who will run Pakistan, and it would be even harder to get the
Army to change course on India.

Neither they nor the present crop of generals will change course on
Afghanistan. No matter how importunate the US and NATO are, the Pakistan
Army will back the Afghan Taliban to the hilt, covertly while its patrons are
there, more brazenly as they pack up to go. It would be nonsensical for the
Army to abandon assets it has nurtured for so long, just when these are about to
yield dividends.

Nor do the skirmishes in FATA and Swat mean that the Army has turned
against the Pakistani Taliban. Only those tribes are being attacked in FATA
that harbour the Arabs and Central Asians, who are Al Qaeda rather than
Taliban, and anathema to the Army, because they reject its diktat, and weaken
its hold on the tribes by buying their support. Killing them, and their Pakistani
supporters, strengthens the Army, reminds the other Pathan tribes that whoring
after false gods is costly, and persuades the Americans that their protégés are
behaving.

Most crucially, these military operations were started, and will continue, to
make the case for the new weapons Pakistan wants from the US. Sceptics in
the US Congress, knowing that Pakistan wanted these to match India, not to
support the US, asked how they would be useful in the war on terror, with Gary
Ackerman, Chairman of the US House Sub-Committee on Foreign Affairs,
scheduling a hearing last September on “Defeating Al Qaeda’s airforce –
Pakistan’s F-16s in the war on terror”.

______________________________________
“Engaging Pakistan”: India Quarterly, Volume 4, 2009 Page |6
This was the friendly fire that panicked the PAF into action for the first time in
FATA. Instead of its Mirages, which carry laser-guided bombs, it used its old
F-16 interceptors to drop dumb bombs, flattening villages. The Army rolled
out its US howitzers, smashed what the F-16s had left, and gave the Pentagon
an action-taken report, which was read out unctuously at the Ackerman
hearing. QED. Like a multi-role F-16, the tough love of the Pakistan Army is a
many-splendoured thing. Its special weapons are tactics to get more special
weapons.

In Swat, so evocatively named, the local Taliban, knowing how important it is

to the Army, overreached. The valleys there, which run east to west, are the
corridors through which the Army shuttles its jihadis between FATA and J&K.
It cannot cede control of these passes, and has gone into action, not to rescue
locals from the Taliban, but to wrest back a strategic asset.

These skirmishes do not mean that the military has at last realized that
terrorism is their enemy, not India. They are tactical operations carried out with
the old strategic objective in mind; a foolish consistency, as Samuel Johnson
said, is the hobgoblin of small minds. And the shallow minds of the Pakistan
Army crave strategic depth. For them that is the only reason Afghanistan
exists. They simply cannot, and will not, take on the Pathans as they did the
Bengalis or the Baluch; Pathans form about 20% of the Army, and there would
be civil war or worse if the tribes were to rise.

The US National Intelligence Council 2008 report on “Global Trends 2025” is

a trifle apocalyptic, but sums it up well:

“The future of Pakistan is a wildcard in considering the trajectory

of neighbouring Afghanistan. Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier
Province and tribal areas probably will continue to be poorly
governed and the source or supporter of cross-border instability.
If Pakistan is unable to hold together until 2025, a broader
coalescence of Pashtun tribes is likely to emerge and act together
to erase the Durand Line, maximising Pashtun space at the
expense of the Punjabis in Pakistan and the Tajiks and others in
Afghanistan.”

The Punjabi jihadis pose an even more potent challenge, because they can roil
the only province that really matters. The Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Jaish-e-
Mohammed may be out of control, though the Army still hopes these prodigals
will return for calibrated use against India. The L-e-T, which has put deep
______________________________________
“Engaging Pakistan”: India Quarterly, Volume 4, 2009 Page |7
roots down in the Punjab, and can unleash mayhem there if crossed, is still
obedient to the Army. Therefore, as Prime Minister Gilani confessed to EU
Ambassadors late last year, while his government has the will to crack down on
it, it does not have the ability. Despite our goading, and that of others after
Mumbai, it will remain, like a woman in a burqa, inviolate.

These jihadi groups recruit from the millions of young Pakistanis who emerge
from vernacular schools and madrassas, imbued with a hatred for the modern
world, in which they do not have the skills to work. So while young Indians go
to Silicon Valley and make a bomb for themselves, young Pakistanis go to the
Swat Valley and make a bomb of themselves, the meanness of their lives
justifying the end. Pakistan has betrayed its youth, which is its tragedy, and as
the US NIC report warns:

“Unless employment conditions change dramatically in parlous

youth-bulge states like Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan and Yemen,
these countries will remain ripe for continued instability and state
failure.”

Pakistan, though, is as bankrupt in its ideas as in its finances. Its 2009 budget,
prepared on an IMF leash, invokes its war on terror to raise defence spending
by 10% and outlays on public order and security by 27%. It also raises
spending on education by 28%, which seems a rare irruption of sense, but Rs. 2
billion each will go to basic education and to an Education for All programme,
and Rs. 22.5 billion, an increase of 60%, to the Higher Education Commission.
Pakistan wants to get a few universities for its middle class to match the IITs,
but leave schools for the lumpen decrepit.

This is foolish. A study done on the background of Pakistanis captured in

Tora-Bora in 2001 showed that as many were from the vernacular schools as
from the madrassas. These schools, where most Pakistanis study, breed just as
many jihadis, with the help of local mosques, as the madrassas do, and a
sensible government would have made their reform the highest priority.

Perhaps a neglect of basic education is the counsel of despair, because there

will be very few jobs for school-leavers. The budget speech noted that the
industrial sector had contracted by 3.3% last year, major manufacturing by
7.7%. Pakistan’s industrial base is narrow: textiles make up 60% of its exports
and half its industrial workforce. Exports have fallen sharply from 2007, when
power cuts crippled production and fears of Pakistan imploding scared
importers off. Pakistan is pleading with the US and EU for preferential access,
______________________________________
“Engaging Pakistan”: India Quarterly, Volume 4, 2009 Page |8
but, even if it gets it, will find it hard to win back custom lost to its competitors,
including India. Its only advantage, that the rupee has lost one-third of its value
against the dollar, makes its imports pricier, and means it must raise exports by
a third in rupee terms simply to get back to where it was in 2007. This is
unlikely. Production and exports will not rise, so unemployment will,
compounding Pakistan’s misery.

The best it can hope for is a return to the smoke-and-mirrors of Musharraf’s

days, when speculative investment flooded in as Arabs and rich Pakistanis,
worried after 9/11 that their accounts in the West might be frozen, looked for
cover, and Pakistan, with its lax controls, was a hedge. There was no
productive investment, no objective correlative to GDP growth, and at the first
push in 2008, the economy crumbled, with Pakistan laid bare as even weaker
than sub-Saharan economies, forced to turn to the IMF as they did not. Its
economy is so brittle and hollow that almost half the present budget is on a drip
of foreign aid. Pakistan has become a lethal and unique basket-case, a leaky
creel full of jihadis and nuclear weapons, which is why it has so many anxious
benefactors, the terrified “Friends of Pakistan”.

No country should be more worried, or have a greater stake in its recovery, than
India. A land of desperate destitutes, led by a bitter and envious soldiery, is a
neighbour from hell. Variable geometry might work in the EU, not in South
Asia with Pakistan seething; if Portugal or Bulgaria fall behind Sweden and
Ireland, they are not likely to set off bombs in Uppsala or Cork.

Precisely, though, when in our own interest we should show through words and
deeds that the Pakistani boat can also rise on the Indian tide, not be swamped
by it, we do not. For years, when Pakistan said that it would only talk to India
about Kashmir, we urged it to discuss the other issues that were of vital concern
to both of us, until it grudgingly agreed to the “composite dialogue”. Now
Zardari’s government wants to talk about everything, we nurse a single issue,
like a Chinese mother. Even in the theatre of the absurd we act out with
Pakistan, this is non compos mentis.

We offer talks as a reward for good behaviour, but Pakistan is not hanging on
our lips, even though our hawks might wish that it would hang itself
somewhere. We say we will only talk about terrorism, and we will stop talking
if there is terrorism, which means that the sponsors of terrorism, who do not
want talks, know exactly what to do. We are in fact offering ourselves as
hostages to terrorism. We need to talk to Pakistan despite terrorism, because
______________________________________
“Engaging Pakistan”: India Quarterly, Volume 4, 2009 Page |9
that it is the only way to show its sponsors that their tactics will not work. And
talking only on terrorism will not make Pakistan give it up any more than we
gave up Kashmir because Pakistan harped only on it. These are forlorn hopes.

Sceptics say talking to the civilians is pointless, since the Pakistan Army calls
the shots. This misses the point that, though the Army does not talk, it listens.
It is the audience before which the dialogue between its government and India
plays out; the actors speak to each other in the limelight, but it is the khaki
darkness they address. If we want to give the Army reasons to change its mind
on India, we can only do it through the reassurances we convey in a sustained
dialogue.

Sustaining either a dialogue or a policy, though, is now hard. Pakistan is a

factor in our domestic politics as even the US and China are not, and, in an era
when no party is strong, none want to be seen as weak. Before every general
election, and every election in a northern or western state where Pakistan is or
can be made an issue, the ruling party has to act tough and India either huffs or
runs out of puff, as though to be strong it must be silent. So party political
interests in India and the praetorian interests of the Army in Pakistan regularly
get in the way of national interests, and since our circadian rhythms do not
match, when one of us is ready the other is not.

In Pakistan, whose politicians droop as fig-leaves on military rule, and general

elections are usually elections of the general’s people, by the general people,
for the generals, politics is rarely local, because the generals would much rather
have the general gaze turned outwards. Baiting India was a must, until the last
general elections, when it just did not figure, because the big parties wanted to
pin on Musharraf, by then no longer COAS, the turmoil that was his legacy. So,
though Pakistan’s politicians are not the arbiters on peace with India, they are
ready to talk. Over the next few years, there are no elections in India where
posturing on Pakistan will buy votes. If Barkis is willin’, will India bark or
talk?

The Pakistan Army will decide based on its perception of its interests, but may
find it harder to whip up tensions if India is a generous and understanding
neighbour. Reciprocity, the staple of negotiations between equals, makes little
sense now between Pakistan and us, when in the US this autumn, Prime
Minister was at the G-20, Zardari in the debtor’s court called the Friends of
Pakistan. For India to insist on reciprocity now in all matters is to concede
Pakistan the parity it craves but does not merit.

______________________________________
“Engaging Pakistan”: India Quarterly, Volume 4, 2009 P a g e | 10
Instead, it would be sensible to come to quick and pragmatic agreements on
problems that have rankled for decades. On Sir Creek and Siachen, where
differences have been narrowed, reaching a modus vivendi is not difficult, and
should be a priority. These are both emotive issues, used by the Pakistan Army
as prime evidence that India refuses to settle any bilateral problem. Resolving
them gives the lie to this, weakens the Army’s propaganda, burnishes India’s
image in the eyes of the common Pakistani, and promotes our interests, while
sacrificing none.

There is still Kashmir, but that too is doable. Musharraf prepared Pakistan to
accept that it cannot have Kashmir, and though the Army under Kayani has
reversed other policies that flowed from this fundamental shift, there is no
evidence so far that it will oppose a settlement on Kashmir, as long as that does
not lead to a peace which hurts its interests. It may tolerate peace if its interests
are protected. It should not be beyond the wit of two able sets of leaders and
diplomats to ensure this.

Anyone who has lived in Pakistan recently is struck by the sadness and apathy
that seem endemic there. Pakistanis are clever people, know how far their
country has fallen and, unlike their generals, do not think that India can be
stopped, or that it helps them in any way if it is. They want to see Pakistan rise
and be admired in the world, as India is, as even the smaller members of
SAARC are. For all their troubles, Bangladesh prides itself on the innovations
of the Grameen Bank, now replicated throughout the developing world, Sri
Lanka on standards of social development unmatched by other poor countries,
Nepal and Bhutan on remarkable transitions to democracy. What do Pakistanis
have to make them proud?

Indians of a certain age, who remember when the image of India abroad was a
woman with a begging-bowl, should know how deeply ashamed Pakistanis feel
that the world now sees them as mendicants with suicide-belts on.
Unfortunately, very few Indians have the chance to live in Pakistan and to get
to know its people. The overwhelming emotion that those who do come away
with is not love or hate, contempt or fear, but pity.

Gandhi would have urged India to be generous for pity’s sake, but also in its
self-interest, as he did when he went on his last fast, just months after the first
war with Pakistan, to urge India to give Pakistan the 55 crores that were its due.
The objections then were exactly the objections now – give Pakistan money
and it will use it to buy arms for use against India. As indeed it did, proving the
nay-sayers right. Since then, we have become more Chanakya’s disciples than
______________________________________
“Engaging Pakistan”: India Quarterly, Volume 4, 2009 P a g e | 11
Gandhi’s, but of the seven ways of dealing with neighbors the Arthashastra
offered – samman, upeksha, bheda, maya, indrajala, danda and dana – we
have tried the first six, without much luck either.

So perhaps the time has come for us to marry Gandhi and Chanakya and try on
Pakistan a selfish altruism, our dana not a gift that can be turned against us, but
a determined, hard-headed generosity that we can turn to our advantage.

That is the carrot, but what if it does not tempt? Do we go back to sulking in
our tent, nibbling on our spurned bait? Where, our television channels, with
their orgasmic patriotism, would clamour, is the stick? FICCI has it. The
report it commissioned in 2009 on India’s security urged a panoply of sanctions
if Pakistan misbehaved, conceding that there would be costs involved for India,
but Pakistan would pay a much heavier price. Would it really? We tried
everything we could think of after the attack on our Parliament in 2001. If the
security experts who wrote the report for FICCI had done an audit of the impact
of Operation Parakram, they might not have been quite so sanguine about
sanctions. A nuclear-weapon state that imposes sanctions on another is very
like a man confidently stepping out onto a frozen sidewalk: he cannot step
back, he has no idea where he will end up, and the rest of the world gives him a
wide berth until he comes to rest, usually in shavasana. In 2002:

- we had just become the destination of choice for IT outsourcing.

Suddenly, banks and other financial institutions, which were sending
their operations offshore, panicked that all their records might go up in
smoke if our sanctions led on to war. The search for alternatives to
India, which led to the emergence of East Europe, the Philippines and
South Africa as competitors, began then. Plans for India were put on
hold, and we lost at least two years when we could have made ourselves
even more than we are now, the favoured IT destination. Pakistan had
nothing outsourced to it, except terrorism, so it suffered nothing;

- European companies that had put all their eggs in the Chinese basket had
just started to think of India as a hedge. Investment was picking up. It
stopped in its tracks. No one wanted to make investments which might
also go up in smoke. Again, Pakistan suffered nothing, because no one
was investing there in any case. It lived, then as now, on aid, which
donors did not want to turn off, fearing that they would drive Pakistan
over the edge and lose what little influence they had;

______________________________________
“Engaging Pakistan”: India Quarterly, Volume 4, 2009 P a g e | 12
 - our trade took a beating, because Lloyds put a war-risk premium on all
shipping touching South Asian ports. This immediately put our
manufactures at an even greater price disadvantage to China’s. In
textiles, for instance, where Bangladesh, Pakistan and we compete, there
were extra costs for all, but Bangladesh had duty preferences as an LDC,
while Pakistan had just got a similar concession for being an ally in the
war on terror; ours were the exports affected;

- tourism to India, which now forms 6% of our GDP, had just begun to
take off. It came to a juddering halt as travel advisories were issued by
all Western governments. In EU practice, travel agents who send clients
to countries under advisories forego insurance, so no agent wanted to
take the risk. Pakistan was not affected since it has no tourism; the only
tourists who land there are those whose planes have been hijacked to
Pakistani airports;

- the bulk of our air traffic still goes west, as does Pakistan’s, which meant
that the ban on overflights made hardly any difference to Pakistan, but
forced long and costly detours on Indian flights to Europe and America;

- and then there was the trauma of the villagers at the border, where, a
year after we had lifted sanctions, we still could not lift the mines,
because no Western nation would sell to nations at the risk of war the
modern equipment to detect and lift mines quickly. Farmers at the
border probably could not till their fields for the best part of two years.

The list goes on, but the costs to us, which were disproportionately heavy then,
would be even heavier now, as our engagement with the world has deepened so
much more. Pakistan, on the other hand, is even further on the fringes of
globalization now than it was then, and barely surviving on a drip of foreign
aid, which just cannot be turned off. On it the impact of our sanctions would be
marginal, as would measures the world took to insulate itself from the two of
us.

The one card we did not play then was water, but wise men of Hindoostan urge
the government to play it now if Pakistan does not behave. This assumes that
water is a viable sanction, we have an alternative to negotiations. So we must
ask, is it, and if it is, should we use it? The first question first. Under the Indus
Waters Treaty, Pakistan has unrestricted use of the three western rivers, which
carry 80% of the flow of the river system, which means that, even if we dam up
all the water in the eastern rivers, Pakistan would still have most of the flow.
______________________________________
“Engaging Pakistan”: India Quarterly, Volume 4, 2009 P a g e | 13
And of course we cannot run the eastern rivers dry without building enormous
reservoirs, which would mean flooding huge tracts of Indian land at political
and economic costs that are presumably unsustainable, since we have not built
them in the 50 years that the Treaty has been in effect.

Which leaves us with trying to reduce the flows in the western rivers, but the
moment we do so, we would be blatantly in breach of the Treaty, and would be
asked by arbitrators to stop. That assumes, of course, that we could reduce the
flows there, but we cannot, without building dams, which, under the terms of
the Treaty, Pakistan would have to clear. And even if we went ahead and built
them, ignoring international obloquy, it would take a decade from today for the
first dam to come on stream.

So water is not a viable sanction, but even if it were miraculously to become

one, should we use it? In 2005, a World Bank report on Pakistan’s water
economy warned that glacier melt and irregular monsoons could lead to
apocalyptic consequences for Pakistan’s agriculture. In 2008, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that crop yields could drop
by 30% in South Asia by the middle of this century. Pakistan, which depends
on a single river system, would be the country hardest hit, even if we continue
to honour the Indus Waters Treaty in letter and spirit. Would our trying to turn
it into a desert bring any pressure to bear on its army, or wean the population
from it? I doubt it. For the average Pakistani, India would become the ogre
that the Army has always said it is. We would simply play into its hands.

So there are really no options to a dialogue, to trying to engage Pakistan,

though the task may seem thankless and the road never seem to end.

______________________________________
“Engaging Pakistan”: India Quarterly, Volume 4, 2009 P a g e | 14