India has been witnessing over the lastfew weeks a hard fought battle between
two conflicting ideas - vision of improving relations with Pakistan and making South Asia a zone of peace and the hard political reality that elements in Pakistan, including some in the ruling establishment, are committed to using terror to destabilize India, especially Kashmir. The battle is primarily for the hearts and minds of the Indian people.
There is a large constituency in India which favours improvement in relations with Pakistan, if necessary, by throwing aside the baggage of the past including the animosity resulting from the Partition, which created Pakistan on the basis of religion. Even on Kashmir, many Indians want a solution to be worked out, though nobody would accept either an independent Kashmir or further division of the country.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last month became the latest top Indian leader to give expression to the vision of making South Asia a zone of peace by reaching out to Pakistan. He did so despite tell-tale proof of elements in Pakistan continuing to back and sponsor terror strikes in India. The last big instance of that was the 26/11 Mumbai terror strikes, which claimed 180 lives. Apart from that, Pakistan continues to push in terrorists not only into Kashmir, but also other parts of the country. This is apparent from the arrest by Delhi police of terrorists said to be planning to create mayhem during the Independence Day celebrations later this week. There are also signals of infiltration into Kashmir going up, which is shown by the increasing encounters between the security forces and militants in the valley.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's reaching out to the country's western neighbour does not come all of a sudden. He has been saying from time to time that India is prepared to walk more than half way if Pakistan shows willingness to crackdown on terrorist elements operating from its soil and targeting India.
The joint statement issued by India and Pakistan after talks at Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, between their Prime Ministers on the sidelines of the Non-aligned Summit encapsulated this approach. Dr. Manmohan Singh and Yousuf Raza Gilani agreed to debracket talks and action against terrorism. This was a departure from India's earlier stance on not resuming the composite dialogue till Pakistan took concrete and credible action against terrorists targeting India and especially those who carried out the Mumbai terror strikes.
In his intervention during the debate on foreign policy issues in the Lok Sabha, Dr. Manmohan Singh, outlining his vision, said that it was in India's "vital interest to make sincere efforts to live in peace with Pakistan." At the same time, he made it clear that "despite the best of intentions, we cannot move forward if terrorist attacks launched from Pakistani soil continue to kill and injure our citizens, here and abroad. That is the national position. I stand by it."
Dr. Manmohan Singh's clarification sought to deflect criticism of the Sharm El-Sheikh joint statement by not only the Opposition, but also elements within the ruling coalition. Significantly, the Congress which is heading the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA), itself kept silent on the matter, leaving it to Government functionaries to defend the statement.
The Opposition openly termed the joint statement as a sell out of the national interest, allegedly under American pressure. The charge tended to stick despite disclaimers from the Indian government as well as the United States. American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who paid a visit to India last month, said that her country welcomes the Sharm El-Sheikh joint statement, but denied that US pressure had been at work.
While Dr. Manmohan Singh eloquently defended his reaching out to Pakistan, he got only guarded backing from Congress president Sonia Gandhi. In her address to the Congress Parliamentary Party on July 30, she said in carefully chosen words that the party's position on relations with Pakistan remained unchanged. Sonia Gandhi said: "The Prime Minister had made a firm and unequivocal statement in the Lok Sabha on major foreign policy issues. There should be no doubt on the party' position in the matter."
The Congress party's conditional and guarded backing for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Pakistan initiative flows from the hard political reality of Islamabad stabbing New Delhi in the back in the past. Before Mumbai, there was the Kargil betrayal. Even while then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was engaging his counterpart Nawaz Sharif in talks after taking a peace bus to Lahore, Pakistan was pushing its regular and irregular forces onto the heights overlooking Kargil. The people of India are wary as the experience with Pakistan responding to its initiatives in the past has not been happy.
Pakistan continues to dilly-dally on taking action against the mastermind of the Mumbai terror strikes, Lashkar-e-Taiba founder and Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Saeed.
Despite India providing a number of dossiers to Pakistan containing the evidence needed for prosecuting the Mumbai terror strikes sponsors in that country, Islamabad continues with its claims that requisite evidence for proceeding against Hafiz Saeed has not been made available. Pakistan has now demanded more evidence from India.
As Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram said sometime back, Pakistan's demands for more evidence against the perpetrators of the Mumbai terror strikes are continuing ad nauseum. Hafiz Saeed is a free man in Pakistan as the case against him has not been pursued effectively by Islamabad in the country's courts. The evidence provided by India, in most cases, has not been shared with the courts, with the result that he has been freed from house arrest, which was in any case, a token one.
While Dr. Manmohan Singh is following in the footsteps of earlier Prime Ministers like Jawaharlal Nehru and Inder Kumar Gujral in taking a soft line towards Pakistan, Sonia Gandhi, it appears, does not want the country to fall prey to another misadventure like Kargil. Though the Congress party has ostensibly backed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the Pakistan initiative is not going to move much further given the strong misgivings in the party and the country as a whole on the issue. Already, the BJP is saying that the UPA government is going to surrender on Kashmir on the lines of the Sharm El-Sheikh joint statement. There would be very few takers in the country for such an approach. That is why the Congress party has applied the brakes on the Manmohan initiative on relations with Pakistan.
