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Indo-Pak peace process – first casualty of Mumbai attacks |
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The peace process between India and Pakistan has become the first major casualty of their row over the Mumbai terror attacks. India has virtually halted the Composite Dialogue process, although it has not specifically said so. Already, the Indian cricket tour programme and Minister of State for Commerce, Jairam Ramesh’s visit to Pakistan have been cancelled.
External Affairs Minister, Pranab Mukherjee gave enough indications that the peace process had been put in the pause mode when he told newsmen on Dec. 16 that if had been severely dented by the Mumbai atrocity. He made it clear that the revival of the peace process will have to wait until Islamabad took demonstrable action to get to the bottom of the Mumbai terror attack.
Mukherjee was clearly referring to the assurance given by Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari at a meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the United Nations in September this year that his PPP-led Government would abide by the commitment of President Musharraf not to allow his country’s territory to be used for terrorist attacks on India. By allowing the terrorist attack to take place in Mumbai, Zardari has committed an open and blatant violation of this commitment. The leaders of the new Pakistani Governments whether Zardari when he met Dr. Singh, or Prime Minister Gilani when he had a meeting with the Prime Minister in Colombo on the sidelines of the SAARC summit, had promised to adhere to this understanding as well as the agreement on the cessation of firing across the LoC. In their joint statement after the meeting Zardari and Dr. Singh said, the two countries had a firm and long standing commitment not to allow terrorists to sabotage the efforts for peace between the two countries.
After coming to power, Zardari said many sweet things which were music to India’s ears. . He said that the Kashmir dispute should be put on the backburner in order to increase bilateral economic and trade cooperation. He even took a U-turn on Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine. He said, as a person who had lost his wife to terrorism, he would be the last to support this menace. But as the Mumbai attacks have shown, either Zardari is not standing by his words or he has no control on the instruments of power in his country to implement this pledge. It is widely known that the Pakistani military and the ISI function independent of the civilian Government in Pakistan. They are called a State within the State and many a time they are at odds with the Government in power. Things were different when Musharraf was in power because he was both the President and the Army Chief. After his ouster, this commonality has ceased to exist and clearly one hand does not know what the other is doing. That the civilian Government and the military often work at cross purposes was borne out when the then Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, was hosting the then Indian Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, in Lahore and promising an era of peace while his Army Chief, Gen. Musharraf, was giving finishing touches to his Kargil intrusion blueprint.
The peace process built a number of important constituencies in both India and Pakistan and brought the people in divided Kashmir closer. The Srinagar-Muzaffarabad and Rawalkot-Poonch bus services were started and trade through the land route across the Line of Control (LoC) was given a go-ahead. There has been an unprecedented flow of people across the LoC.
Under intense international pressure and after coming to the conclusion that military action would amount to falling in the trap of terrorists, the maximum India could do to express its anger and protest was to put the peace process on hold. The last time peace process came under the dark was after the July 2006 serial bomb blasts on Mumbai’s suburban train and terminals which were blamed on Pakistan. The Indian reaction to the Mumbai train blasts was so strong that with the exception of the Left parties, all other parties, including the ruling Congress asked the Government to stop the peace process. The Composite Dialogue was resumed after a temporary interval, but the bomb blasts in Jaipur, Delhi and Bangalore once again cast dark shadows on the peace process as fingers were pointed at terrorist groups in Pakistan. The icing was added by the Taliban attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul. Once again the Indian authorities blamed the ISI for organizing the attack with the help of Taliban elements on Pakistani territory. The Indian allegation was supported by the United States when a high ranking American official visited Islamabad and confronted the Pakistani leaders with proof of ISI involvement.
In spite of these provocations, on the premise that Islamabad has no control over these so-called non-State actors and the new civilian Government was sincerely committed to carry forward the peace process started by farmer President Musharraf, New Delhi took the risk of continuing talks on the eight contentious issues which were identified to be taken up under the Composite Dialogue. The two Foreign Ministers and their Foreign Secretaries visited each others country, a meeting of the Anti-Terror Mechanism also took place and trade by land across the LoC was started. However, the cancellation of India’s cricket tour and the visit of the Minister of State for Commerce to Islamabad is a clear pointer that India’s patience has exhausted and it would like to send out a strong signal to Pakistan that terror and the peace process cannot go together.
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