Beyond skirmishes on the LoC-I

The Composite Dialogue, from its genesis at Male till now

The second part of this two-part article appeared on Tuesday under the title Beyond skirmishes on the LoC-II.

The feel-good factor created with the induction of the pro-peace Nawaz Sharif government in Pakistan for the resumption of the composite dialogue process with India was nullified by furiously competing calls for retribution against the provocative killing of five Indian soldiers on August 6 across the Line of Control (LoC). In January this year too, as the dialogue process was yet again resumed after a longer interruption between the Asif Zardari and Manmohan Singh governments, India was enraged over the beheading of one of its soldiers across the LoC. In both cases, the purpose seemed to be provocation – in January, perhaps to jeopardize rapid developments on the liberalization of trade, and in August, to frustrate Mr Sharif’s eagerness to jumpstart negotiations.

Though the number of casualties on both sides this year is almost equal, reportedly nine soldiers on either side, the reaction in India was far more furious than observed previously. In contrast Pakistan adopted a path of restraint this time in terms of rhetoric and media outcry. A section of the media and almost the whole opposition in India built up such a high-pitched backlash that it forced the ruling Congress to follow a virulent nationalist course by asking its cadres to outmatch their competitors in an election time. The composite dialogue process has been halted, even if the two prime ministers agreed to do some damage management when they meet in New York on September 29. However, the meaningful process will have to wait for the outcome of elections in India in April 2014.

Usually, it takes months and years of efforts on various tracks to bring even a constricted process of talks back on rails only to be disrupted by a terrorist act, shelling across the LoC, or countervailing tactics of proxy wars and knee-jerk responses by a besieged diplomatic corps left with no soft options. Such is the frustrating nature of ill-fated talks and its cyclical misfortune that even those who had steadfastly stood up for a détente in the Subcontinent for decades against all adversities now feel exhausted and frustrated with the futility of talking peace, even though there is no alternative to the peaceful resolution of differences and mutually beneficial cooperation. In such a conflicting and distrusting environment, the hawks and hate-mongering forces come into full play, providing a rating-hungry media with a free hand in scuttling any possibility of a leeway for talks and prolonging periods of paralysis and stalemate.

The composite dialogue process was initiated in 1997 in Male, when the then PMs of India and Pakistan, I K Gujral and Nawaz Sharif met on the sidelines of the SAARC Summit and agreed on the framework of a composite dialogue process (CDP). Agreeing to a simultaneous and composite approach, both sides identified eight areas for talks: a) peace and security, including confidence-building measures (CBMs); b) Jammu and Kashmir; c) Siachen; d) Wullar Barridge/Tulbul navigation project; e) Sir Creek; f) economic and commercial cooperation; g) terrorism and drug trafficking; and h) promotion of people-to-people contact.

No tangible movement could, however, be made until the so-called hardline Bharatya Janata Party-led coalition came to power with a man-with-a-peace mission, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, as its prime minister.

Two rounds of composite dialogue were held: 16-18 October and 5-13 November 1998, but the real progress was achieved during Vajpayee’s bus yatra to Lahore in February 1999 for his summit meeting with Nawaz Sharif, resulting in the Lahore Declaration despite the provocation of a terrorist attack on a bus carrying a wedding party in Indian-administered Kashmir. This outcome of the highly successful Lahore Summit opened up a very productive back channel, which was meant to resolve the Kashmir dispute by the end of 1999, as Nawaz Sharif had been repeatedly claiming, and was not contradicted by the Vajpayee administration. The process was, again, subverted with the Kargil misadventure engineered by the then COAS Gen Pervez Musharraf while keeping his prime minister in the dark.

Yet the two prime ministers kept their back channel alive, despite a limited bloody war in Kargil and helped find a way out through the good offices of the then US President Clinton. Sharif delivered on his promise to call back troops from Kargil, which he made to Vajpayee, and would have received a red-carpet welcome if he had decided to stop in New Delhi on his way back from Washington, as R.K Mishra told this writer.

However, the process came to a grinding halt with the overthrow of the Sharif government in a military coup led by General Musharraf as a consequence of intense differences over Kargil. Vajpayee took time to reconcile with the new power structure in Pakistan till the time the deposed prime minister was flown out of the country. With him in prison, according to R.K Mishra, Vajpayee was adamant that he could not talk to Musharraf. Committed to making a historic breakthrough with Pakistan, Vajpayee again tried to initiate the back channel with Musharraf before the Agra summit and deputed R.K Mishra to resume exchanges with the Musharraf administration. Perhaps Gen Musharraf wanted to stage a diplomatic coup over Vajpayee and did not let Mishra obtain a visa from Pakistan’s embassy in Singapore for pre-summit deliberations in Islamabad.

With his pushy nature, Musharraf was responsible for squandering a rare opportunity at the Agra summit with Vajpayee, who was also under pressure from his more hawkish colleagues not to go the extra mile in what was now a more cautious Indian approach with the architect of the Kargil episode. The responsibility for the failure of both the substantive Sharif-Vajpayee initiative and the Agra summit lies squarely on Musharraf’s shoulders.

The Agra summit fiasco was exacerbated by the terrorist attacks on the Indian parliament on 13 December 2001, which brought the Indian armed forces into a virtual eyeball-to-eyeball face off with the Pakistani armed forces. Then the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US changed the strategic environment in the region and both Pakistan and India joined the UN-backed and US-led war against terror with a focus on the Af-Pak region. But it took longer for India to climb back and diplomatic relations were not restored until July 2003. It was on the occasion of the South Asian Free Media Association’s (SAFMA) second Indo-Pak Parliamentarian conference in August 2003 that Musharraf responded positively to a joint parliamentarians’ appeal for the withdrawal of forces and ceasefire: he accordingly called for a ceasefire and troop withdrawal.

The ceasefire agreement on the LoC signed in November 2003 was more or less kept by the two sides with the exception of occasional crossfire across the disputed border that divides the former state of Jammu and Kashmir. It became quite effective after the January 6, 2004 statement signed by Musharraf and Vajpayee in Islamabad where Pakistani authorities had assured the Indian prime minister that Islamabad would take the necessary preventive measures to stop infiltration across the borders with India. Though minor violations continued and both sides kept on accusing each other of breaching the agreement, the low intensity was perhaps tolerable and did not flare up into bigger border rows.

This was the time that, even after the change of the Vajpayee government in India, back channel diplomacy between Musharraf and the Manmohan Singh government was initiated.

Four rounds of negotiations were held on all eight baskets of composite dialogue. The back-channel had almost succeeded in evolving a mutually acceptable broader understanding of a historic out-of-the-box solution to the festering dispute over Kashmir. It should be noted that the back-channel gained impetus after the first exchange of journalists between the two countries, who visited both sides of divided Kashmir; this helped create a consensus on travel documents and paved the way for opening up the LoC to both sides of divided Kashmir.

Musharraf and Manmohan deserve laurels for brokering a pragmatic deal on Kashmir and Nawaz Sharif need not reinvent the wheel with the next government of India. The postponement of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Islamabad and, later, the lawyers’ movement against General Musharraf in March 2007 created such uncertainty over the fate of his regime that the ‘non-paper’ (which was in fact a quasi-draft agreement) could not be signed or made public. Former foreign minister of Pakistan, Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri and former Indian external affairs minister Natwar Singh had confirmed that both sides had agreed on the basic outlines of an accord on Kashmir.

The writer is secretary-general of the South Asia Free Media Association and editor of South Asian Journal.