Pervez Musharraf and India Pakistan Rapproachment

The recently concluded elections in Pakistan were unprecedented in many ways. One of the less noticed aspects of these elections was the complete lack of hostility towards India during the electoral campaigns of various candidates and political parties. There was no rhetoric calling for a thousand-year war; no mention of completing the “unfinished business” of the Partition, no talk of jihad to liberate Muslim brothers suffering under the Hindu yoke nor of bleeding India with a thousand cuts - not even of providing principled support to the Kashmiris’ struggle for freedom. This was a vast change from most previous elections when political parties vied with each other for anti-Indian rhetoric.

The election was mostly about domestic issues at a time when Pakistan is facing existential challenges – both internal and external. One could therefore say that India was the least thing on the minds of the Pakistani political parties. This would be only partly correct - all major political parties did take a position on India in their respective election manifestoes and their positions were almost identical: they all want to have a close and friendly relations with India; they are all willing to leave the resolution of the Kashmir dispute for a future date and accelerate the process of normalization of the relations with the neighbour they all considered to be not only their enemy but their only enemy not long ago. In other words, their position is now the same as has been of India for a long time now.

Eight years of the Musharraf era has seen a sea change in the Indo-Pak bilateral relationship. This change has become possible, perhaps even inevitable, in the new world that we find ourselves after September 11, 2001 but Musharraf, in my opinion, can also take a large measure of credit for this change. This was not an easy road for Musharraf to travel. He did not start the process of bilateral relationship with India on a clean slate, which indeed was as messy as it could get. General Musharraf, when he staged his coup against Nawaz Sharif, was more unpopular in India than perhaps any Pakistani leader since Jinnah created the new country. He was the architect of the Kargil adventure and immensely proud of his role in it. Indians generally believed that he torpedoed the successful Lahore “yatra” undertaken by the Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to improve bilateral relationship between India and Pakistan; many in India and Pakistan believed that Vajpayee and Sharif had even agreed on a blueprint for a resolution of the Kashmir problem. They also generally believed that the Kargil operation was undertaken without the knowledge and approval of P:rime Minister Nawaz Sharif, an allegation repeated by Nawaz Sharif who also claimed to have been stabbed in the back by the general.

The change in Musharraf’s approach to India was neither easy nor sudden. He initially thought that Kargil was a very successful operation from Pakistani perspective, and perhaps still does, as it put the international spotlight on the Kashmir issue. He refused to admit that this spotlight was actually quite negative from the Pakistani viewpoint and turned a largely sympathetic or indifferent international opinion about the Kashmiri separatist struggle into an anti-Pakistan opinion as a nuclear-armed dangerous country.

Musharraf started his India file by virtually rejecting the Lahore declaration made by Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif and even refused to recognize the 1972 Shimla Agreement between Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as the basis for resolving all bilateral disputes between India and Pakistan. He maintained this position, along with an almost arrogant swagger, during the Agra summit in July 2001, when he refused to accept any reference to the ending of cross-border terrorism in Kashmir and cancelled the rest of his trip to India.

I believe the seminal event that changed the course of India-Pakistan relationship was the attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001. Coming soon after the 9/11 attack in New York, it evoked a similar kind of anger and condemnation. The angry reaction in India was such that there was demand for action against Pakistan, whom the Indians blamed for engineering the attack. Prime Minister Vajpayee cancelled all military leaves and ordered mobilization of the armed forces along the border. It appeared for a while that an all-round confrontation between the two nuclear-armed countries was unavoidable. It was then that the US administration decided to involve more actively in the subcontinental affairs with a two-pronged approach: First, they issued a travel advisory against travel to India and Pakistan; though seemingly even-handed, this act was in fact tilted against India; travel to Pakistan had already been reduced to a trickle by then and the travel advisory had therefore no effect on that country; the situation was not the same for India, whose nascent IT industry had resulted in frequent travels by US businessmen looking for outsourcing their work to Indian companies. The advisory had the desired effect and IT business tycoons from Bangalore rushed to Delhi to advise the government to have sober second thoughts. The second US prong was to assure India that they would put effective pressure on Musharraf to stop Pakistani support of jihadi outfits against India.

The US efforts did not have an immediate effect. India did not trust Musharraf and it did seem, at first, that Musharraf was only interested in a temporary halt in the support of Kashmiri jihad and not willing to dismantle the jihadi support infrastructure. The relationship between the two countries remained frigid, so much so that one SAARC meeting was cancelled because of the Indian leader’s refusal to sit at the same summit table with Musharraf and another was marked by his reluctance to shake hands with the Pakistani leader at Kathmandu. The momentum was built slowly resulting in Vajpayee’s visit to Islamabad in January 2004 and the Islamabad Agreement between the two countries, resuming the bilateral composite dialogue suspended since Musharraf’s coup d’etat. Musharraf said at that time, “ History has been made. This is a beginning. This statement is not an end in itself, obviously, but a good beginning has been made."

Indian and Pakistani leaders had made many similar statements in the past, but it was different this time. Musharraf meant what he said and he issued orders to end the support for all cross-border jihadi activities. On the other side, Vajpayee took measures to conduct perhaps the first free elections in Indian Kashmir, which resulted in the ouster of the unpopular Farooq Abdullah government and brought in its place a more popular government led by Mufi Mehmood. The bilateral talks resulted in the opening of bus travel between the two Kashmirs for the first time after nearly sixty years. The climatic point in the bilateral relationship was reached in April 2005 when Musharraf declared while on a trip to India that the peace process between the two countries had become irreversible.

The eight years under Musharraf have seen tremendous strides in all aspects of bilateral relations between the two countries. Travel between the two countries is more normal now than at any time since the creation of the two countries; buses now ply regularly between Delhi-Lahore, Amritsar-Nankana sahib and Srinagar-Muzaffarabad; train service has been resumed between Rajasthan and Karachi. Air services has been expanded to include Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad and now private airlines have been allowed to fly between the two countries. It has become much easier to obtain a visa to travel between the two countries with senior citizens being able to walk across the border. While Sikhs were always allowed to visit their sacred places in Pakistan, the same facility is now being given to Hindus as well to travel to places like Ketas Raj. There are frequent visits of cricket teams to each other’s country and the matches are not marred by the hostility that was the hallmark of such matches in earlier years; indeed Shoab Akhtar is as popular in India as in Pakistan and Sachin Tendulkar so in Pakistan. Entertainers from each side are seen in the other country’s television channels, as are political pundits; important media channels in the two countries have permanent correspondents in the other country or send them regularly to cover important events, such as the recent elections in Pakistan.

Although Pakistan has not yet given the MFN status to India, bilateral trade between the two countries has gone from insignificant to over a billion dollars. The trade balance is currently heavily skewed in India’s favour but this could change if the various proposals for gas pipelines come to fruition.

The people-to-people contact has had the desired effect. People from both sides have begun to discover that those on the other side are not ogres and indeed are quite similar in many ways to themselves. I was recently watching an Indian television channel’s interview with a panel of young Pakistanis about their views on various issues. The interviewer naturally asked them about how they foresaw future relations with India. All of them had nothing but fervent hopes for a close and warm relationship with the former enemy; only one of them even mentioned Kashmir as an issue between the two countries.

Would the history of bilateral relationship between India and Pakistan be the same if Musharraf had not been the Pakistani leader during this period? It is difficult to answer this question just as it is difficult to answer any “what if” question regarding history. But what one can say, with some degree of certainty, is that another leader could not have made a complete about-turn in his policies towards India as Musharraf did. A civilian leader would almost certainly have been vetoed by the military, including the ISI, in any radical departure from historical positions vis-à-vis India in general and Kashmir in particular. Musharraf’s personality, especially his penchant for taking quick decisions and decisive actions under the changed circumstances in which Pakistan found itself following the US “war on terror” undoubtedly played a significant part in changing the direction of Indo-Pak relations.

The Musharraf era now seems to be coming to an end. But if the current trend towards normalization of relationships between the twins separated at violent birth continues, the people of the subcontinent, if not the world, would owe a sense of gratitude to the now unpopular dictator.