Although Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s provocative remarks about Pakistan earlier this month appear to have cast a shadow over upcoming talks between India and Pakistan, they came as little surprise.
Not for the first time has such ‘tough’ posturing by India preceded diplomatic engagement between the two countries, whose on-off, start-stumble character has long characterised the crisis-prone relationship.
The foreign secretary-level talks, due to take place in Islamabad on August 25, will in fact, offer an opportunity to reset ties and resume the dialogue process. This was suspended by India early last year following the flare up of tensions on the Line of Control in Kashmir.
Although diplomatic interactions have since continued, meetings have taken place ‘outside’ the formal process, and structured talks, known as the ‘composite’ dialogue, did not resume, leaving the normalisation of ties at a virtual standstill.
The meeting between the foreign secretaries follows the decision made by the prime ministers of the two countries when they met in Delhi during Mr Modi’s inauguration in May that their respective officials should “explore how to move forward”.
As no agreement emerged from that meeting to revive the broad-based dialogue, the diplomatic encounter between the foreign secretaries will essentially assume the nature of talks about talks – on the shape, scope and structure of the future dialogue.
The prevalent thinking in Islamabad is that expectations need to be realistic and the pace measured of the renewed diplomatic effort to normalise relations between the two countries. In other words, wishes should not determine Pakistan’s approach, but a hard-headed assessment of what is possible and mutually acceptable to move the normalisation process forward.
The talks will enable the Pakistani side to test how seriously India’s new government wants to engage with Pakistan and ascertain the parameters and quality of that engagement.
Leaders of both countries have said they want good neighbourly relations and that their priority is their country’s economic progress and development. But does economics create sufficient common ground to offer a way forward when the strategic environment remains fraught with mistrust and unresolved disputes?
Prime Minister Modi’s keenness to play a prominent role on the global stage has drawn much comment. In July he attended a summit of Brics countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) in Brazil. And he has a much-anticipated visit to Washington lined up next month. But his government’s foreign policy priorities have yet to be spelt out. It is also unclear if Modi’s selection of a hard-line foreign policy and national security team will influence his approach to Pakistan.
As a Western analyst recently put it: “Modi’s politics haven’t been tested on foreign relations yet”. Among his early foreign policy moves have been visits to two of India’s smaller neighbours, Bhutan and Nepal. These have widely been seen as efforts by the Indian leader to shore up his country’s regional position with an eye on China’s growing influence in South Asia.
Against this backdrop, the key question, when foreign secretary Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhry meets his Indian counterpart Sujata Singh, will be whether the Indian side will commit to the resumption of a comprehensive dialogue, encompassing all outstanding issues and perhaps newer ones of importance to both sides.
The Pakistani side should seek to ensure that the ‘composite’ dialogue framework (involving eight baskets of issues), which has been in play for the past decade and a half, is not abandoned and replaced by a truncated process of issues cherry picked by the other side.
In recent months and in the final years of the previous Indian government, Delhi often indicated an intent to narrow the scope of the diplomatic engagement to the three ‘Ts’ – terrorism, trade and trial of those accused of the Mumbai incident.
Any effort by the Indian side to narrow the bandwidth of talks should be resisted by Pakistan, which should insist on a comprehensive framework for the dialogue and normalisation process. Limiting the scope and terms of the future dialogue in a way that excludes contentious issues or relegates them to the backburner is neither realistic nor will make the normalisation process sustainable.
Earlier suggestions by a senior member of the government’s foreign policy team that Islamabad will not be averse to a “new architecture” for talks presumably means that so long as the framework for dialogue is all-encompassing and also incorporates issues of current importance, what that process is called – ‘composite’ or any other name – is less important than its actual substance.
That being the case, it will be important for the Pakistani side to continue to insist on a broad-gauge dialogue process that reflects all the issues and disputes of importance to Pakistan. Any reconfiguration of the dialogue structure should be predicated on an agenda that meets the concerns of both sides so that Delhi does not wriggle out of its responsibility to address longstanding disputes.
Process and structure is important because that will determine the content of normalisation, which should proceed in a comprehensive not selective or fragmented manner for it to be viable and long lasting.
On trade, recent indications from Delhi, and from the interaction between the two countries’ commerce ministers at a Saarc meeting in Thimpu last month, are that the Modi government is – for now – in no rush to move on this front, unlike its predecessor, and contrary to the expectations of a section of Pakistan’s business lobby.
This can also be gauged from statements made by Indian officials in May, which talked about restarting the process from the ‘roadmap’ agreed in the September 2012 trade talks, and not January 2014, when a meeting between commerce ministers had apparently advanced the process beyond 2012.
In any event, next week’s talks will afford an opportunity to determine the pace and content for promoting trade relations. That trade should be part of a package, i.e. an overall improvement in the bilateral atmosphere, is the dictate of common sense, as well as of recent experience.
Tensions on the LoC last year halted any progress in liberalising trade between the neighbours. This underscores an ineluctable reality – commercial relations will advance in any meaningful way in tandem with, and not in isolation from, efforts to deal with the underlying reasons for the fraught strategic environment.
But the elephant in the room in the talks ahead is Afghanistan, an issue on which the two countries have never held formal discussions. Yet this is the issue that can cause turbulence in Pakistan-India relations and even upend them in the near term. This is especially so because of the uncertainty that surrounds Afghanistan’s political and security transitions as the December 2014 deadline nears for the pullout of Western combat forces from that country.
Islamabad and Delhi’s suspicions about each other’s moves and strategic intentions will likely intensify in the post-2014 period, urging the need for them to start having a serious conversation about their respective concerns and interests in Afghanistan. This doesn't have to be part of any formal dialogue.
But informal discussions are necessary and can provide an opportunity for the two sides to set out their redlines and bottom lines and even explore where possible tradeoffs might eventually be made. Even if they find their interests hard to reconcile in the first instance, as they likely will, such discussions could be a useful way to ‘manage’ the issue and prevent it from derailing the bilateral relationship.
So what can realistically be expected from next week’s foreign secretary-level talks? The best outcome would be a resumption of the formal dialogue and an agreed road map for future meetings, which identifies areas of cooperation but also sets out an agreed agenda indicating a mutual willingness to consider contentious issues.
What both sides will have acknowledge is that a comprehensive peace process is the only way to reconcile divergences and build on areas of convergence. Anything less would neither work not should it be acceptable to Pakistan.
The writer is special adviser to the Jang Group/Geo and a former envoy to the US and the UK.
This column was written before the announcement of postponement of talks.
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Talks about talks, again - Dr Maleeha Lodhi
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