India and Pakistan will on 23 August embark on a landmark mission at conciliation even as their troops trade gun and mortar fire across the highly-militarised Line of Control (LoC) in the disputed frontier region of Kashmir.
The two nuclear-armed South Asian neighbours are setting great store by the first ever National Security Advisor (NSA)-level talks scheduled for that day in New Delhi. India will be represented by its NSA, Ajit Doval, and Pakistan, by his counterpart, Sartaj Aziz. Both the crusty spymasters are veterans in their field, the 70-year-old Doval having been an intelligence and law enforcement officer who is now the 5th NSA to the Indian Prime Minister (Narendra Modi), while 86-year-old Aziz is an economist and strategist, who is also a key advisor to Pakistan’s Foreign Affairs ministry.
The NSA-level talks had been proposed at the 10 July meeting between the Indian and Pakistani Prime Ministers, Narendra Modi and Nawaz Sharif, on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Ufa, in Russia.
The two countries have been seemingly unable to emerge from their grim history of four wars against each other – in 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999. There have besides been numerous border skirmishes and military stand-offs that have exacted a heavy toll of both their peoples and their economies.
As in the past, Indian and Pakistani troops used the occasion of their countries’ 69th Independence Days – India’s on 15 August and Pakistan’s, a day earlier – to pound civilian hamlets and forward posts in the disputed Kashmir region. This sustained firefight killed at least six civilians in India and two in Pakistan, maiming and injuring several others.
Over the previous fortnight, India was the victim of two terror strikes it blamed on Pakistan. Three suspected armed infiltrators killed seven people in attacks on Dinanagar town in Gurdaspur in the border state of Punjab. The terrorists were holed up in a police station for over 11 hours before they were killed. In a separate terror attack, two militants ambushed an Indian Border Security Force (BSF) convoy in Udhampur in Jammu, part of the border Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), killing two soldiers and injuring 14 others. While one of the two assailants was killed, the other was apprehended and reportedly revealed that he was from Faisalabad, in Pakistan.
For the past few years, bilateral ties have simmered as New Delhi charges Islamabad with sponsoring terrorism across the borders and with denying its complicity in some of the most virulent sub-national onslaughts against the Indian state. In turn, Pakistan has been seeking a “resolution” on the status of J&K over which the two countries have gone to war three of the four times, in 1947, 1965 and 1999. The 1971 war had led to the creation of Bangladesh. Islamabad also accuses India of backing the insurgency by autonomy-seeking Baloch groups in the southwestern province of Baluchistan. As by terrorism in India, Pakistan has been marred by sectarian strife between the majority Sunnis and minority Shia population.
It is now hoped that the upcoming negotiations between Doval and Aziz will set the tone and tenor of India-Pakistan engagement that will lead to the resumption of the bilateral dialogue. They expect a meaningful exchange rather than rhetoric from the two senior interlocutors, as a derailment of this initiative, even by external provocations, can well jeopardise the peace process for a long time to come and sustain the prevailing hostility. While proposing the NSA-level negotiations in Ufa, Modi and Sharif had also agreed to meet again at the UN General Assembly in September.
The two sides are evidently mindful of the fact that to resolve a conflict, it is always prudent to understand its genesis. The cross-border dispute between India and Pakistan is a tragic saga of neighbouring countries wracked by an internecine strife when they can well prosper and build on their complementary economies if they were only to outgrow their differences.
When India, the jewel of the British Empire, was granted Independence on 15 August 1947, the epochal event was blighted by a division of its territory along religious lines that engendered the two nations of India and Pakistan. This cleavage itself ignited a war on the issue of Muslim-dominated Kashmir’s accession to India that was signed by the princely state’s then Hindu ruler.
India appealed to the UN to mediate. As a result, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 47 in April 1948 followed by the partition of Kashmir in December into Indian- and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Some 38,000 sq km in the north-east of Indian-controlled Kashmir was overrun and occupied by Chinese forces during the 1962 war with India. This region is still in dispute between the two countries, though there was a move by India to forego claims on it if China were to do likewise on the 83,743 sq km north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh.
India and Pakistan delineated a Ceasefire Line (CFL) under the Karachi Agreement of 1949, marking it only upto a spot designated NJ 9842, stating, “runs thence north to the glaciers”. In 1994, the Indian Parliament passed a resolution that entire Kashmir, in accordance with the accession document, is an integral part of India.
History, by its very definition, is often a tragic narrative. And many nations like India and Pakistan would do well to bury such a past and move on to reconciliation. There have been numerous peace initiatives between the two countries, but often it takes but an isolated incident to overturn the entire process. For instance, the Foreign Secretary-level negotiations planned for 25 August 2014 had been called off after India resented Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit’s meetings with separatist leaders just a week before the talks.
The two adversaries stand to gain hugely from reconciliation. Both have, after all, historically been one country, one folk, one culture and one history. Many on both sides of the border share the same language, and love for cricket and field hockey, and share even the same classical music, poetry, and literary thought. People-to-people contacts have thrived, with artists, musicians, authors, thinkers, scholars and film-makers invited to each other’s countries regularly. They receive hearty welcomes and warmth wherever they go in their host countries.
Any outbreak of hostility can have disastrous consequences for both countries and, more importantly, their peoples. They are both nuclear powers, they have both invested heavily in their military and there’s desperation on either side in not letting the other gain the upper hand.
To keep matters on even keel, India and Pakistan would do well to jointly develop a mutually workable system that sustains irrespective of the changes in their governments. Such a system would succeed if it benefited both the peoples. Its starting point could well be the ensuring of economic harmony through the incentivised growth of trade, investments and businesses across the borders.
Two-way trade at present takes place through two channels: formal trade that is pursued officially, and informal, or illegal, trade that is conducted either through cross-border smuggling or routed through third countries. The formal channel has hobbled along over the years, touching a value of $2.46 billion in 2014, with the balance of trade of $2.03 billion heavily in India’s favour. Informal and third country trade has performed far better in comparison, its worth variously estimated at $8 billion to $10 billion for 2014. Its volume underscores the immense potential for official trade, considering the common land – and sea – boundaries that ensure easier access and cheaper flow of raw materials, lower transportation and insurance costs, and wider markets, all this translating into quality goods at competitive prices for both the countries.
Such a trade and investment linkage can act as a force multiplier by increasing the economic dependence of both countries on each other and firming their resolve for cross-border economic stability. This can motivate both governments to normalise their political equations and resolve their border disputes amicably. India has granted Pakistan the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status and, in turn, expects Islamabad to go beyond creating a positive list of importable goods from India.
India and Pakistan are already members of a strong regional trading bloc, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). The other member states are Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Mutual investment can be promoted through an apex SAARC Development Bank like the one proposed for the BRICS nations.
The comparative advantages of the SAARC nations can also be leveraged in their crop patterns. A study of productivity of major crops would reveal that certain countries are better placed than others in growing certain crops. It would be mutually advantageous if countries specialised in crops they produced at lower costs and thereby build a network of agricultural imports and exports. If each member state specialised in certain crops instead of all producing every crop, cumulative farm production could well expand by 10 per cent without any additional inputs. Price incentives could be provided for farmers to understand the benefits for themselves and for consumers.
An effort could be made to promote joint tourism programmes/packages with the participation of India and Pakistan to begin with, and to subsequently extend to other countries in the SAARC region. Singapore and Indonesia have such a joint tourism package and their experience could be drawn upon. Such bilateral or multilateral tourist packages would go a long way in promoting mutual understanding and appreciation of others’ culture.
SAARC was founded in December 1985 and its Charter proclaims that member countries are “Desirous of promoting peace, stability, amity and progress in the region through strict adherence to the principles of the UN Charter and Non-alignment, particularly respect for the principles of sovereign equality, territorial integrity, national independence, non-use of force and non-interference in the internal affairs of other states and peaceful settlement of all disputes”.
This principle clause awaits execution for the mutual benefit of all, in particular India and Pakistan.
