With parliamentary elections behind it, India shouldn’t be back at square one in its quest to settle the bitterly divisive issue of Kashmir, one that has led to three full-scale wars with Pakistan and that nearly brought the two countries to the brink of nuclear combat.
India missed its great opportunity to resolve the burning dispute with Pervez Musharraf before he was overthrown from the Pakistani presidency last year. According to the British and American diplomats I talked to 18 months ago in New Delhi and Islamabad, a deal was tantalizingly close. One British ambassador told me that India had to make very few concessions to strike a final deal and that the main barrier to the agreement was merely “psychological.”
If Musharraf wasn’t prepared to give away the store, the Pakistani compromises came close to it. But despite the seemingly friendly diplomacy of Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee, the unwarlike prime minister Manmohan Singh and, in the background, (another peace-loving figure) the chairwoman of the Congress Party Sonia Gandhi, India couldn’t bring itself to go the extra mile.
Observers had different explanations for Indian intransigence: that Musharraff was trying to force the pace; that the Indian army, the intelligence services, and senior bureaucrats in the foreign ministry were resisting an accord; that the leadership had not made an effort to educate the electorate as the Pakistan government had done; that the prime minister was weak and only focused on the economy; that his (successful) attempt to lower the grinding poverty in the rural areas was also a preoccupation; that the time consuming nuclear deal with the U.S was critically important; and that India rather liked the status quo, since stubbornness fitted in with its self-image of being the subcontinent’s super power.
There was also the failure of the Bush administration—it pushed a deal through Congress that lifted the long-standing embargo on selling nuclear materials and reactors to India—that was, in Singh’s words, “loved” by his country. America could have used the muscle afforded by the nuclear deal to instead help push India to sign on to Musharraf’s magnanimous offer.
Now, Singh unexpectedly finds himself riding high. Not only did his party win hands down, but the national grumbling that Singh was a weak prime minister has disappeared.
Singh might still say, as he said to me 18 months ago, “How can you expect me to push a peace deal when militants are coming from Pakistan every few months to set off bombs in India?” Needless to say, the big bombing in Bombay towards the end of last year reinforced his argument.
But when I repeated this in my interview with Musharraf, he responded sharply.
“I don’t agree with his way of looking at it. If everyone in the world looked for calm and peace before reaching a solution, we would never achieve peace anywhere,” Musharraf said. “It is the political deal itself that can produce calm. Bomb blasts are a result of the problem. Let’s not put the cart before the horse.”
Musharraf had his own reasons for compromising—and so does his successor, the democratically-elected President Asif Ali Zardari. The conflict led to guerrillas fighting for a free Kashmir (which Pakistan’s intelligence service had supported in secret for a long time, although much less these days). In turn, these militants have given aid, men, and advice to the Taliban in Afghanistan. For their part, the Taliban have perhaps given succor, or at least provided an example, to other militants that tried to kill Musharraf and that on the eve of the election murdered the president’s wife, Benazir Bhutto.
Can India go on stalling—tying down the Pakistani army on its joint borders—while watching Pakistan perhaps tear itself apart?
The official Indian stance is to claim the whole of Kashmir, including the part long occupied by Pakistan. But in the earlier negotiations India did concede in principle to the notion of “soft borders”. That has already allowed limited bus travel across the “line of control” that divides the two halves of the region. India hinted at consideration of the abolition of this “line of control,” and at the same time accepting the division of Kashmir, the withdrawal of Indian soldiers, and separate autonomy for the two parts of Kashmir. Some have called this the “Irish solution.”
Up to this point India has not been prepared to close such a sensible deal, although Musharraf’s offer is still on the table and would mean forsaking Pakistan’s dream of uniting its part of Kashmir with Pakistan proper.
Prime Minister Singh must now step forward and make the historic compromise.
Jonathan Power is a syndicated columnist and a contributing editor of Prospect magazine, London. His most recent book is Conundrums of Humanity (Martinus Nijhoff, 2007).