Jonathan Power
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh: time for a bold move
With the election behind it, it shouldn’t be back to square one for India in its quest to settle the bitterly divisive issue of Kashmir, one that has led to three wars and once brought the two countries to the brink of nuclear war.
India missed its great opportunity to settle the burning dispute while the military president, Pervez Musharraf, who ruled Pakistan until his overthrow last year, was in power.
According to diplomats I talked to eighteen months ago, both British and American, in New Delhi and Islamabad, a deal was tantalisingly close. One British ambassador told me that the main barrier to a deal was “psychological” and that India had to make very few concessions to make a final deal.
If Musharraf wasn’t prepared to give away the store, the Pakistani compromises came close to it. But India, despite the seemingly friendly diplomacy of the Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee, the unwarlike prime minister, Manmohan Singh and, in the background, another unwarlike figure, the chairwoman of the Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, couldn’t bring itself to go the extra mile.
Observers had different explanations for Indian intransigence- that Musharraff was trying to force the pace; that the Indian army, the intelligence services and senior bureaucrats in the foreign ministry were resisting an accord; that the leadership had not made an effort to educate the electorate as Pakistan’s had done; that the prime minister was weak and over preoccupied with the economy; that his (successful )attempt to lower the grinding poverty in the rural areas was also a preoccupation; that the time consuming nuclear deal with the U.S was critically important; and that India rather liked the status quo, since stubbornness fitted in with its self-image of being the sub continent’s super power. There was also the failure of the Bush Administration that was, in Singh words, “loved” by India for pushing a deal through Congress that lifts the long standing embargo on selling nuclear materials and reactors to India. America could have used the muscle that the nuclear deal gave it to help push India to sign on to Musharraf’s magnanimous offer. Read more »
Jonathan Power
Richard Holbrooke: Obama's man in Pakistan
Today, Pakistan is probably the most dangerous country in the world. Yet it is India—not Afghanistan or al Qaeda—that bears much of the responsibility for this; and that, arguably, is the country holding the key to the beginnings of a solution.
More’s the pity, then, that President Barack Obama backed down as soon as India protested the mandate he wanted for his sharpshooting diplomat, Richard Holbrooke, which as originally intended would have included India as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan. Holbrooke is now operating under the title of United States Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan—and is reduced to dealing with only two sides of the triangle of madness.
Of course, it is an over-simplification to finger India as the originator of the region’s woes. It ignores history, not least the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which left behind a raging civil war in Afghanistan, enabling the rise of the dogmatic Taliban, who in turn gave a home to Osama bin Laden.
In 1986, I visited Peshawar in north east Pakistan, close to the Khyber pass. The town even then was full of armed encampments in its outer suburbs—Pathan chiefs who had escaped with their people from the war in Afghanistan had built huge well defended compounds to house the refugees from their kin group. It was clear then that the hospitality that Pakistan felt it had to extend to the displaced Pathans was storing up trouble ahead. Two million such refugees bred violence and extremism.
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Salil Tripathi
Holy cow
In 1997, the year India and Pakistan celebrated the 50th anniversary of their Independence from Britain, the former British foreign secretary, the late Robin Cook, made some ill-judged remarks about Kashmir, saying: “We realise it is our responsibility to resolve this dispute in view of its historical perspective. The Labour Party wishes to solve this problem according to the aspirations of the people of Kashmir, and, therefore, the two parties should accept her role in this regard.” Then Indian Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral responded by calling Britain “a third rate power” which should mind its own business. Diplomats quickly tried to row back, but the damage had been done.
Odd, then, that history would repeat itself so quickly— when David Milliband, on his recent visit to India, linked the November Mumbai terror attacks with Kashmir. He did not say so explicitly, but his intention seemed clear: if only India settled the problem in the north, the outrage in India’s commercial capital would have been avoided. Maybe his briefing papers did not include the Cook-Gujral kerfuffle, but Milliband’s statement – which angered the Indian establishment – was wrong on four counts…
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