COVER STORY

Diplomacy in question

Many of the diplomatic advantages that served India well represented a gradual accretion over the years, rather than the outcome of efforts directly related to the Kargil conflict.

SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN
in New Delhi

WHERE the interpretation of facts is concerned, the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir evidently represents a point of inflection. It is commonplace to see battlefront situations being depicted to suit the convenience of the moment. Since independent verification is often infeasible, there is a reasonable chance that governments could reassure their constituencies by the simple expedient of denying all that the other side may assert to be true. But the Kargil events have brought to the fore a new form of escapism - of one country asserting to be true what the rest of the world believes to be false.

Midway through his talks with Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, U.S. President Bill Clinton broke off to call up Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. There were concurrent contacts between U.S. National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and his Indian counterpart, Brajesh Mishra, as also U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh.

Spokesmen for the Indian government have cast this sequence of telephonic contacts as an exchange of information on the progress of talks between the U.S. and Pakistan. In this respect, the construction is the same as that put on the visit of Gibson Lanpher, Assistant Deputy Secretary in the U.S. State Department, in the last week of June. Immediately after General Anthony Zinni, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Central Command, concluded his mission of persuasion in Pakistan, Lanpher had flown to Delhi to fill in the Indian government on the progress achieved. Well before Lanpher arrived in Delhi, the Ministry of External Affairs was going to great lengths to put the attendant circumstances of his visit in perspective: the U.S. government had offered to brief India on Gen. Zinni's visit to Islamabad and the Indian government had accepted. Further, it was explicitly stated that no time-frame had been fixed for Lanpher's visit. India was anxious to avoid the impression that there was a direct association between the Zinni mission to Islamabad and Lanpher's arrival in India - a conjunction in time would have led to the impression that the U.S. was asssuming a mediatory role.

In the event, Lanpher arrived in Delhi immediately after he had participated with Zinni in an effort to persuade the Pakistan government and army to back off from its adventure in the Kargil heights. That was sufficient for official circles in Pakistan to put on his visit the gloss of a mediatory effort. Similarly, after Nawaz Sharif was lectured by the U.S. administration and compelled to concede ground in Kargil, the Pakistan establishment has sought, though without carrying great conviction, to interpret the concurrent contacts between the American and Indian governments as the beginning of a phase of active big-power involvement in South Asia.

The claim is premised upon the assurance that President Clinton will take a "personal interest" in the progress of talks towards a final settlement of the status of Kashmir. This is by all accounts a rather weak foundation. The personal inclinations of an individual are not easily institutionalised as an element of policy, even when he happens to be the U.S. President. And this particular individual has less than two years of his term to run and for the larger part of this period he is likely to be restrained from engaging in diplomatic initiatives with longer-term consequences.

From the intercepted conversations between Pakistan Army chief General Pervez Musharraf and his principal aide - which the Indian government released with fanfare - it is clear that one of the principal aims of the Kargil adventure was to open up the Kashmir issue to international mediation. For this precise reason, it was the foremost priority of Indian diplomacy to ensure that at no stage would there be even the remotest prospect of third-party mediation.

Pakistan had two clear options to use the vantage points it had gained in the Kargil heights to prise open the Kashmir issue - to call in its debts from the days when it was a staging post for American strategic manoeuvres in the Central Asian region; and to utilise its long-standing special relationship with China. Neither option afforded it much sustenance in the context of the Kargil conflict, for reasons derived from geopolitical events over the last two years, if not more.

When U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Pakistan in November 1997, she made a highly publicised visit to an Afghan refugee camp near Peshawar. Going down on her hands and knees to listen to the tales of woe narrated by a group of women, Albright assured them of all assistance in the effort to restore order and sanity in their country. Commenting on the spectacle of the U.S.' top diplomat donning the mantle of humanitarian compassion, Thomas Lippmann wrote in The Washington Post: "The sight of Albright on her hands and knees showed how much attitudes in Washington have changed." But within Pakistan, the same event had a very different resonance, aptly summarised by Maleeha Lodhi, the newspaper editor who served as Pakistan's ambassador in Washington during the Benazir Bhutto administration: "There is a very clear perception that the U.S. is reweighing its relations in this part of the world towards India."

V. SUDERSHAN
U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Gibson Lanpher in New Delhi on June 27.

Why an enlightened social commentator should interpret an expression of humanitarian concern for Afghanistan in terms of a rivalry between Pakistan and India must seem a bit of a curiosity. But the Kashmir dispute, which gained much of its virulence as a consequence of the burgeoning political animosities of the Cold War, has over the past few years settled back into a bilateral framework. The American keenness to do battle on behalf of Pakistan has been dampened by the Taliban experience and by the palpable reality of a Pakistani state that is today besieged by the forces it set loose in Afghanistan.

Pakistan's other option also proved a non-starter. Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz went to Beijing to recruit Chinese support just before he was scheduled to arrive in Delhi for a June 12 appointment with his Indian counterpart. Nawaz Sharif himself went to China later in the month on a visit that had been scheduled well ahead of the Kargil hostilities. But a planned five-day visit was curtailed to two days. And no sooner did the Pakistan Prime Minister arrive in Islamabad than he had to rush off for a meeting with the U.S. President.

China's disinterest is entirely comprehensible, though it is notionally a third disputant in the tussle over the disposition of the territories of Jammu and Kashmir. The model of rapprochement that India and China have adopted since the early-1990s was in fact commended to Pakistan by Chinese President Jiang Zemin, when he visited Islamabad in 1996 - to leave the really intractable issues aside and address other areas of potential mutual benefit. It was not a piece of advice that went down particularly well with his hosts.

An entirely avoidable irritant cropped up with the Indian nuclear tests last year, and by the BJP-led government's identification of China as the principal national security threat impelling the country to seek recourse in nuclear deterrence. For a while, particularly after President Clinton's visit to China in June 1998, it seemed that a political axis of China, Pakistan and the U.S. would coalesce around the shared interest of containing India. But China's equations with the U.S. soon began deteriorating. And Beijing could not have watched the intensive "strategic dialogue" between the U.S. and India that followed the Pokhran nuclear tests with great equanimity. To be seen as the solitary prop for Pakistan's adventurism in Kargil was, in the circumstances, an inadvisable option. It would have boosted American influence in India and cemented an alliance between the two to the disadvantage of China.

In other words, many of the diplomatic advantages that served India well were a gradual accretion over the years, rather than the outcome of efforts directly related to the Kargil conflict. Moreover, there is still much ambiguity around the actual conduct of diplomacy over the last two months. Credible reports have emerged, for instance, that India communicated its intent to launch full-scale hostilities against Pakistan unless the U.S. brought its truculent former proxy in the region to heel. Another rather dubious event was the exchange of personal envoys between the two Prime Ministers, in what was a rather clumsy effort at "back-channel" diplomacy.

Clearly, the visit to Delhi by Niaz Naik, the former Pakistan Foreign Secretary, was an unusual event. He came by a special aircraft and met both Prime Minister Vajpayee and his National Security Adviser, Brajesh Mishra. The whistle was blown on this unconventional exchange by Pakistan government sources who wished to remain unnamed. It was also then revealed that the ground for Naik's visit to Delhi had been prepared by a visit to Islamabad by Vivek Katju, Joint Secretary in the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, and R.K. Mishra, lobbyist for an industrial house.

Questions could justifiably be asked about the kind of diplomatic instrumentalities the Vajpayee government used in the context of Kargil. Naik himself was obviously authorised, after his visit to Delhi, to announce that negotiations towards a "so-called withdrawal" of forces from the Kargil region would shortly commence. That no such negotiations took place is of course a comment on the efficacy of bilateral channels of communication. That it finally took U.S. coercion to turn the tide, perhaps provides a foretaste of greater U.S. engagement in the affairs of the region.

Visiting Lucknow in the last week of June, Prime Minister Vajpayee spoke of a "final settlement" of the Kashmir dispute - a phrase which in the accepted usage of his political fraternity can only mean the unification of all the territories of the erstwhile princely state under Indian sovereignty. But concurrent locutions about preserving the "sanctity" of the LoC obviously do not mesh with this perspective. What the Prime Minister could have meant must then remain a matter of speculation. The obvious solution - characterised by some as the lazy and complacent one - is to declare the LoC as the international border. Whether the political will exists within India to take this giant leap, remains unclear. And prospects of a unilateral declaration of intent winning adherents on the other side would seem remote. If in the process the disputants in Kashmir bring in an arbiter, it would essentially be turning the clock right back to where it was during the traumatic days of Partition in the subcontinent. If they choose, against the grain, to bring in the people of Kashmir as equal partners in a dialogue framed by realistic rules of engagement, then a breakthrough in the cause of peace and sanity may well be possible.