As tensions between India and Pakistan increase along the Line of Control, question marks are being slashed on many Indo-Pak subplots. Peace with India has always been pretty high on the agenda list for Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, but the recent exchanges along the LoC have meant that the peace process has hit a stubborn wall. And one of the manoeuvres that might be the most severely affected is the recently proposed India-Pakistan pipeline.
As discussed in this space before, Pakistan and India last month discussed a deal for a 110-km gas pipeline from Jalandhar to Wagah border via Amritsar, which would have taken around 18 months to be completed. Somewhere around 400 million cubic feet of gas per day was going to be gasified from LNG at the Indian end, which would then have been pumped into the pipeline for Pakistan. The only aspect that was being negotiated was the tariff, which sooner rather than later would’ve been finalised. Now with India Pakistan exchanging bullets along the LoC, it’s difficult to see them get on the table to negotiate the exchange of gas any time soon.
There are few better ways of ensuring peace in troubled regions than energy exchange. And so in the case of India and Pakistan, it’s a bit of a chicken and egg thing going on. You need relative peace, to work on energy projects that in turn ensure that the bilateral ties are prodigiously more peaceful. When two countries are involved in an energy symbiosis and depend on one another for their energy needs, the odds are that they would try their utmost to ensure regional tranquility so that the respective countries don’t drag themselves into energy quagmires. What we’ve seen over the past week or so, has been the exact opposite, with neither country missing an opportunity to voice their impractical readiness for war.
Consider this: if Pakistan and India had been at either of a pipeline, or even involved in a regional pipeline project (maybe IP or TAPI), the recent stunts along to LoC, from both sides, would’ve been inconceivable. So it’s a vicious circle really, with India and Pakistan. You need projects like the India-Pakistan pipeline to ensure that things don’t get out of control in the region, but till a project along those lines is sanctioned and implemented, we’d continue to be vulnerable to frivolous diplomatic statements and manoeuvres from both India and Pakistan, and the aforementioned stunts wouldn’t bear any risks at all.
It wouldn’t be logical to completely bury the future of India-Pakistan pipeline owing to the recent happenings, but it is understandable that neither country would be discussing the project any time soon. With Pakistan hitting stumbling blocks on both IP and TAPI fronts, they seem to have hit another one on the new IP (India-Pakistan) pipeline front as well. Even if the clouds wither away and Indo-Pak ties return to something bordering on stability, the new IP would still continue to be marred by similar outbursts on the LoC. And hence, the 18 months that have been touted as the time needed for the completion of the project – and that too after the deal is finalised – don’t seem like being a year and a half long.
Pakistan’s gas demand is around 8 billion cubic feet, while the country is producing merely half of that. All three of the pipelines that are in the proverbial pipeline – namely Iran-Pakistan, Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India and India-Pakistan – all have succumbed to political or security crises. And hence, it does seem like that the answer to Pakistan’s gas question lies in LNG import from the likes of Qatar more than in any quixotic pipeline webs that might possess multi-pronged answers to a plethora of South Asian questions. The region can neither deal with the chicken nor the egg. And so, the answer for Pakistan might lie somewhere else.
The writer is Energy and Finance Correspondent, Pakistan Today. Email: [email protected]; Twitter: @khuldune
