It serves nobody’s purpose – not India’s, not Pakistan’s, nor the rest of the world’s – to allow the recent negative vibes over horrific incidents on the Line of Control (LoC) to degenerate into open hostilities or war. But it serves even less purpose to pretend that peace with Pakistan can be achieved by one-sided concessions, or what passes for policy on the Indian side.
The real choice before India in the wake of Pakistan’s continuing bad faith is not war or peace, as our weak-willed peaceniks and phony intelligentsia presume. Our only realistic option is a tense form of peace that can be held together by our own internal preparedness for any eventuality. We cannot count on Pakistan to do its bit to engender trust in us about their intentions, and history provides ample proof of this.
This calls for India to put a long-term strategic plan in place – the main elements of which include a strong defence capability, a strong counter-intelligence capability, the ability to destabilise Pakistan for our own purposes, and the ability to make precision strikes at terror targets inside Pakistan that would also include plausible deniability on India’s part.
Without these elements, no peace policy can work, for they will be seen by Pakistan as being the result of our weakness – and they would not be wrong on that score. Failure to secure ourselves is cowardice of the highest order masquerading as peace-seeking.
The peaceniks argue that pushing trade and easier people-to-people relationships will improve the constituency for peace inside Pakistan, and there is some truth in that. We should encourage trade and more people-to-people contacts.
But even this policy will fail if we do not understand what Pakistan will use these concessions for. The Pakistani army and the jehadis will use these open conduits to push hostility covertly. For example, once huge trade volumes result, what is to stop Pakistan from using a corrupt border bureaucracy to push guns or dangerous material into India directly through the trade route instead of clandestime means? For that matter, what is to stop Pakistan from pushing jehadis through the freer visa regime? Do we have the capability to monitor who comes and goes, when we have a track record of letting thousands of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis to overstay here without any machinery to check this influx? Decades after the Assam agitation, we have not pushed even a handful of illegal Bangladeshis out. Pakistanis will melt away just as easily in India with freer visas.
The reason is simple: Pakistan knows what it wants from India and is willing to stake everything it has to get it. We don’t know what we want from Pakistan, beyond a vague hope that they will leave us alone. That they won’t allow.
As MJ Akbar wrote the other day in The Times of India, Pakistan has a clear India policy (and this policy is decided by the army), but India’s has none towards Pakistan. A mushy approach to peace does not amount to a hard-headed strategic policy of engaging Pakistan that will really promote peace in the neighbourhood.
Let us acknowledge that there is real mistrust between Pakistan and India, but we are more willing to forget it than them. This is why we are repeatedly surprised by their perfidies. After each Pakistani outrage, we blustered for a while and then gave up.
As Akbar notes: “There were 57 cross-border violations by Pakistan in 2010, 60 in 2011 and 117 in 2012. Delhi’s response has been a private, and sometimes public, campaign to reduce our forces on the border. If it takes two sides to go to war, it also takes a partnership for peace. Manmohan Singh has the look of a lonely man abandoned by the partner of his dreams.”
For real peace to break out, several things have to change internally in Pakistan, but there is nothing we can do about it beyond preparing ourselves for the next act of perfidy from Pakistan and plan for some form of retribution and resilience.
To be sure, this writer is dead against the kind of jingoism being bandied about in some prime-time TV channels. These channels, in fact, play right into Pakistan’s hands by strengthening jehadi forces like Hafiz Saeed and his cohorts.
However, consider what Mihir Sharma considers a strategy for peace in Business Standard: “India must push the agenda of increased openness and interdependence for its own reasons and in its own interests. This will, tiresomely often, require of us the high road. It will involve ignoring frequent provocation from one or another of the many interests in Pakistan who see rapprochement with India as dangerous — whether the bearded prophets of India’s dismemberment or the Scotch-swilling empire-builders in the cantonments. It will involve making concessions when returns seem non-existent or delayed — Pakistan still hasn’t granted India most favoured nation status, as it promised to do by the end of 2012. But that is what bigger partners do; and that’s the price of securing our neighbourhood.”
Sharma even thinks that Manmohan Singh‘s big achievement is the Sharm el Sheikh agreement with Pakistan, which was widely seen as a sellout. He believes that the Congress party humiliated Singh for allowing the Pakistanis to insert a line indicating that we may be fomenting trouble in Balochistan.
Now consider Akbar’s riposte to this: “Islamabad took the measure of Delhi in 2009 at Sharm el Sheikh, when, despite the international outrage over Mumbai (i.e. 26/11) and evidence of Pakistan’s involvement, it was Singh who made extraordinary concessions to put together a joint statement. The text was not shown to India’s National Security Adviser, MK Narayanan, who went ashen when he read the contents a little before it was released to media. Narayanan’s silence was purchased with a ghostly residence in Kolkata, also known as the Raj Bhavan. Pakistan’s Army concluded that if it could get away with Mumbai, it could get away with anything. It has.”
So the route to peace is to keep giving in to Pakistan’s belligerence?
Sharma’s logic for continuing with turn-the-other–cheek policies is this: “First, no other policy has worked. Outright belligerence? Failed. Using the United States to nudge the Pakistan establishment towards peacemaking? Failed. Turning our back on that border completely? Failed.”
What is missing in the above paragraph is one more line: “One-sided concessions and repeated peace overtures to Pakistan: Failed, too.”
To those who truly believe in peace, I offer this simple logic to understand why we can only achieve a tense form of peace guaranteed by our own toughmindedness.
We have to ask ourselves: What does Pakistan want from us, and are we really willing to give it?
Pakistan wants two things: validating its core ideology of founding a state based on Islam; and Kashmir, by hook or by crook. The least of Pakistan’s demands in this area would be either the prising of the whole of Kashmir from us, or at least the Kashmir Valley. For this it is willing to be our permanent enemy, even if it means impoverishing its own masses. So if it cannot win a war, it will want to keep bleeding us by sending us jehadis, feeding arms and ammunition to other violent forces in India (the Maoists), by sending in counterfeit Indian currency, and by ganging up with China or whoever it considers as sufficiently inimical to India.
Is India willing to give up Kashmir for peace? Is it willing to sacrifice the logic of secularism for peace? If it is, we might as well accept the Sangh logic and declare India a Hindu state, since the only reasoning on which a Muslim-majority state like Jammu & Kashmir can be given to Pakistan is through the acceptance of this sectarian idea.
And it won’t end there: after Kashmir, we will have parts of Assam – where there is a significant Bengali influx – seeking similar remedies. Or even Nagaland or Mizoram or even Kerala.
An Indian loss on Kashmir will stoke the very forces that work against our secularism. They will become unstoppable if Pakistan gets it way on Kashmir, even partially. Remember how Pakistan turned jehadi after the loss of Bangladesh? A similar fate awaits us if we use spurious logic to acquiesce in Pakistan’s blackmail.
The only way out is for India to prepare for 100 years of Pakistani belligerence and perfidy. It won’t be peace, or war, but something in-between till something fundamental changes inside Pakistan. A bottom-up push towards secularism of a people tired of war and jehadi forces.
We can’t change them. They have to do the job themselves. We can help them best by being implacable in pursuing peace by being internally strong – economically, politically and militarily and in many other ways.
The paradox of life is: only the strong get peace. The weak will always invite war. Our peaceniks are inadvertently inviting the worst form of Pakistani behaviour by serving up cowardice as the road to peace.
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