Forty-Eight Hours in Pakistan

Two days in Islamabad is hardly time enough to gauge all one wants to know about Pakistan but does not dare ask. Yet, because I attended a truly enlightening seminar at which several distinguished Pakistani scholars spoke with brutal frankness about the internal situation in Pakistan, and had a long chat with Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri, my decades-old Cambridge college class-mate, now somewhat startlingly elevated to foreign minister of his country, and worked the phones to speak to friends all over Pakistan, I think I can claim with confidence that the desire for a settlement with India is widespread, sincere, and even ardent. Feed-back I have received to my participation, along with two Pakistani MPs (known in Pakistan as MNAs), in a TV panel discussion hosted by Pakistan’s Prannoy Roy, Hamid Mir, reinforces this.

The prevailing military regime with a civilian facade is the optimal combination for us to strike a deal with. The Indian illusion needs to be buried once for all: that a democratic government, as we understand it, can ever be conjured into existence in Pakistan. The army is the largest political party by far and it has conquered the only country it is capable of conquering — its own. So, whether it is behind the scenes or centre-stage, it is the army which controls the polity.

Yet, as a perceptive Pakistani participants in the seminar pointed out, the Pakistan army is perhaps the only politicised army in the world which is desperate for constitutional cover. Not satisfied with authority alone, it seeks legitimacy — first, under the constitution and validation through the courts; second, through association with comprador political parties; and, third, co-option of the urban middle-class, which is ‘‘socially progressive but politically conservative’’ because it dislikes and distrusts the largely feudal and unrepresentative political class drawn substantively from rural Pakistan. To this we must add the attempt to demonstrate to the people of Pakistan that a military dictator can do business with India — the ultimate insignia of statesmanship and, therefore, legitimacy. The Musharraf-Jamali regime is thus the right combination for hammering out a settlement that can be ‘‘sold’’ in Pakistan and prove relatively durable.

Yet, that is where the good news ends. For the Pakistani establishment seems as clueless as our own as to where we go from here. This might be just as well, because instead of being trapped in mindsets we could begin afresh on a clean slate. The need now is not for the meaningless reiteration of conditionalities which the Pakistanis will neither fulfil nor can be enforced on them by India, the US or both, but for talks about talks aimed at so structuring the substantive dialogue as to make it, as and when it takes off, both uninterrupted and uninterruptible. Joint Secretary-level discussions, spun out over several sessions, and commencing after the two new high commissioners are in place, is the present imperative.

We have in New Delhi a lame duck government that is sentencing itself to an early election. The structuring of an uninterrupted and uninterruptible dialogue is thus likely to coincide with the installation of a post-election Government of India. This would place the next government in an ideal ‘‘early days’’ mode to conclude a historical ‘‘final settlement’’ with our distant neighbour, as envisaged in the Simla Agreement of 1972. It is only if the albatross of India-Pakistan relations is cut from our collective necks that India can assume its deserved place in the comity of nations.