Book Excerpt: Essays in Mutual Comprehension
In May 2004, the Vajpayee-led NDA suffered a shock defeat in the general elections. The new Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, with Manmohan Singh as prime minister, signalled strong continuity in foreign policy. PM Singh made it a point to seek a few briefings from Mishra and met Vajpayee several times.
On the new PM’s first day in office, I remained one of his private secretaries, as part of the transition team that would make way for a new one. I needed to schedule a series of congratulatory calls from world leaders and sit in on them. George W. Bush was one of the first callers (with Condoleezza Rice patched in); he assured Singh of continuing US friendship and suggested that Rice, who was working closely with him, would be the point person for the relationship.
We had Pakistan’s president scheduled next. Before the call from Musharraf, after I had quickly briefed the new PM on Vajpayee’s peace process, he asked me whether it was OK to quote a couple of Urdu couplets, apart from using the PMO brief. He produced a piece of paper and read out two couplets he had handwritten in Urdu. I said they sounded perfectly fine, reflected his persona, and should go down well with Musharraf.
Soon after the conversation began, in English, Manmohan Singh told Musharraf he had something to say in Urdu: ‘Kuch aise bhi manzar hain tareek ki nazron mein/ lamhe ne khata ki, sadiyon ne saza payee (History has seen missteps that we have suffered for ages.). He followed it up with another one: ‘Aa ki tarikyon se surkhiyan paide karen, is jameen ki bastiyon se aasman paida karen (Let’s seize this moment and reach for the sky.)
A bemused Musharraf listened with rapt attention as his new Indian counterpart recited couplets in Pakistan’s official language. The two men agreed to work for peace.
As Manmohan Singh crafted his new foreign policy, the emphasis remained on continuity in major relationships. On Pakistan, Singh decided to take forward the Vajpayee peace initiative and the Lahore–Islamabad peace process. This was in line with the personal convictions of the prime minister, who had been born in what was now Pakistan’s Punjab. Singh had the advantage of having two former envoys to Pakistan in his team—National Security Advisor Mani Dixit and External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh. Both former IFS officers seemed equally convinced that a breakthrough with Musharraf’s Pakistan was worth striving for.
Without wasting any time, Dixit met with Tariq Aziz in June, resuming the quiet conversations that had led Brajesh Mishra to the January document. Dixit would meet Aziz four times that year. He did not discuss any specific agreement on Kashmir but prepared the ground for opening the LoC for travel and trade.
On 23 July 2004, External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh, who had dealt extensively with Zia in the 1980s, got to call on Pakistan’s latest dictator. The ninety-minute meeting took place in Musharraf’s camp office at Rawalpindi. Musharraf reiterated a statement he had made the day before, that without any progress towards the settlement of the core issue of Kashmir, no headway on confidence-building measures was possible.3 Despite Musharraf blowing hot and cold, the meetings held by former envoys Natwar Singh and Dixit created grounds for the upcoming first encounter between Manmohan Singh and Musharraf in September. The meeting in New York between the new Indian PM and Pakistan’s dictator at the height of his powers was held on the margins of the September UN General Assembly. As the talks began, Manmohan Singh assured Musharraf that he remained personally committed to the dialogue process.
Both leaders emerged pleased with the hour-long conversation and, unusually, Musharraf read out the agreement their teams had worked out, saying they had ‘also addressed the issue of Jammu and Kashmir and agreed that possible options for a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the issue’. They signalled continuity by adhering to the ‘spirit of the Islamabad joint press statement of January 6, 2004’, and ‘agreed that CBMs will contribute to generating an atmosphere of trust’.
Manmohan Singh added poetically that this meeting was ‘an essay in mutual comprehension’5 and that the two leaders would together write a new chapter in the history of the two countries. Musharraf presented Singh a painting of the school in Gah village (now in Pakistan), the Indian PM’s birthplace, and where he had had his initial schooling. On his part Singh again recited the Urdu couplets which he had read out to Musharraf in their phone conversation.
Reacting to criticism that the latest joint statement failed to mention ‘cross-border terrorism’ Natwar Singh told journalists in London on 1 October that the fact that the 6 January statement was specifically mentioned at the meeting meant that terrorism was indeed discussed. He pointed out that the composite dialogue had kicked off with as many as eight meetings ‘in all areas and at all levels’. Underlining the importance of economic contacts despite political hurdles, he cited China’s example and said that India’s trade with that country was slated to touch $10 billion that year.
The competing narratives of terrorism or Kashmir as central issues continued to play. When Indian Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran arrived in Islamabad on 25 December to wrap up the eight-track composite dialogue process, he was conscious of criticism at home that the new government was falling into Pakistan’s trap and not keeping the focus on terrorism. In Islamabad, however, he felt obliged to counter another critique in the Pakistani media: that India was putting a premium on confidence-building measures to sideline the Kashmir issue. Saran said while the focus of the foreign secretary-level engagement was on building mutual trust in the fields of nuclear and conventional arms and countering narcotics trafficking, India was ready for a ‘serious and sustained dialogue’ on Kashmir. But he also reminded the media of the ‘fundamental assurance’ given by General Musharraf in January 2004 about not allowing Pakistani soil for anti-India activities.
Talking Siachen
As the eight-track composite dialogue chugged along at the level of secretaries, defence secretary-level talks were scheduled in May 2006. The will to demilitarize the Siachen Glacier seemed stronger on both sides than in 1989 or 1992; the two armies had even agreed on authenticating the ground positions of the troops in an ‘annexure’ to the proposed agreement. This would have allowed troops ‘to mutually withdraw’ and be spared ‘extreme cold and unpredictable weather in inhospitable areas’. In fact, Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran had worked out the contours of an agreement with his Pakistani counterpart, Riaz Mohammad Khan. India had insisted that the agreement and its annexure be signed together, explicitly stating that the annexure (authenticating ground positions) carried the same legal validity as the agreement itself. PM Manmohan Singh asked Saran to draft the agreement and take key Indian stakeholders on board. Saran did both.
A crucial meeting of the CCS—the apex national security body chaired by the PM—was to approve the draft agreement, already cleared by the ‘army and other stakeholders’. However, two men in the room had changed their minds. When the meeting started, Saran recalled, NSA M. K. Narayanan ‘launched into a bitter offensive against the proposal, saying that Pakistan could not be trusted, that there would be political and public opposition to any such initiative and that India’s military position in the northern sector vis-à-vis both Pakistan and China would be compromised.’ Army Chief J. J. Singh, ‘who had happily gone along with the proposal in its earlier iterations, now decided to join Narayanan in rubbishing it.’ Narayanan also suggested that the Siachen issue be taken off the agenda for India–Pakistan talks on border issues. Even though Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee supported demilitarization of the glacier and Home Minister Shivraj Patil held the same view, the CCS killed the proposal.
Saran’s account confirmed the prevailing view among diplomats on both sides that agreements on Siachen, as also Sir Creek, were the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of the composite bilateral dialogue. But the army continued to ask if India could ‘trust Pakistan’ and ensure Pakistani troops wouldn’t return to occupy positions in Siachen.
The initiative of 2006—to demilitarize the glacier, mutually withdraw troops from the area and thereafter establish a joint monitoring team—met the same fate as its predecessors in 1989 and 1992. The trust deficit had not yet been bridged.
Sharp differences on the Siachen stand-off within both political and military circles, made a resolution harder. On the Indian side, military commentator and former Northern Army commander, Lieutenant General Rustom Nanavatty, argued that ‘the conflict is essentially over preserving territorial integrity and upholding national military pride. It is an irrational conflict in subhuman conditions with significant costs and little prospect of military solution. Its perpetuation does no credit to political and military leadership at the highest levels in both countries.’20 He suggested that ‘India’s approach to a final settlement should be based on demilitarization of a limited, well-defined and mutually agreed area following a political agreement. There should be a lasting ceasefire, delimiting, demarcation, disengagement, redeployment, verification and joint monitoring and administration’.21 In contrast, a Pakistani perspective by Omer Farooq Zain suggested never giving up: ‘For Pakistan, Siachen glacier is worth the blood spilled over it, and to give it up would be nothing short of giving up its coat of arms.’ Indian military historian Arjun Subramaniam concluded in 2020 that ‘Indian and Pakistani soldiers will continue to patrol the glacier, and the best the two countries can do at this juncture is to minimize the human price they pay by ensuring that living on the glacier is made easier.
Down to Semicolons
On 8 January 2007, Manmohan Singh repeated his idea of soft borders to a Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) business gathering; he dreamt, he said, of the day when ‘one can have breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Kabul’. He added for good measure that industry ought to be prepared for ‘fasttrack economic integration in South Asia’. The next week, India’s external affairs minister, Pranab Mukherjee, met some political leaders of Pakistan for an informal breakfast, where he told them that the borders were not up for negotiations, but India was prepared to discuss all ideas towards the resolution of the Kashmir issue. He said India and Pakistan must learn from Europe that had set aside differences to forge a successful economic union. Mukherjee had been briefed on the quiet progress on the backchannel.
The Backchannel
By early 2007, the tenacious engagement between Lambah and Aziz had led to broad agreement on the contours of a deal that was ready for political endorsement. Away from the spotlight, the countries had engaged in a ‘serious, sustained and structured backchannel negotiation’ for the first time in their history. They had a non-paper ready and had come down to ‘negotiating semicolons’.
Lambah saw his backchannel role as a continuation of the ‘prenegotiations’ that Brajesh Mishra had initiated in 2003–04 and Dixit had continued in 2004–05, both with Tariq Aziz. Lambah reflected that the backchannel initiatives of the twenty-first century were really a continuation of different initiatives by past prime ministers for a final settlement with Pakistan on the issue of J&K. Past proposals had involved adjustments to the ceasefire line, or to the LoC and its conversion into an international boundary. But this time, the vision was to make borders irrelevant. When Lambah was appointed in 2005 as special envoy in the PMO, he saw his mandate from Manmohan Singh as a solution that did not involve redrawing borders. An important reference point to the conversations was Musharraf’s ‘four-point plan’ for Kashmir, which the general had articulated in bits and dribbles at various points over the period 2001–06. The four-point plan involved demilitarization with cessation of military activities; self-governance in the region; a joint mechanism with representatives of India, Pakistan, and Kashmir for overseeing the self-governance; and trade and movement of people between the two parts of Kashmir.
At the same time, Manmohan Singh had famously said in Amritsar on 24 March 2006, that ‘borders cannot be redrawn, but we can work towards making them irrelevant—towards making them just lines on a map’. Essentially, Singh’s idea was of economic integration through soft borders, much like in the European Union. Lambah had concluded that it would be ‘manageable’ to discuss Jammu and Kashmir with Pakistan on the basis of the four-point formula and guided by Manmohan Singh’s Amritsar speech.
With the PM’s permission, Lambah later laid out in a public address in Srinagar the five broad principles at the heart of the Kashmir settlement, that India had explored with Pakistan during 2005-07. These were: freezing the current territorial disposition in Kashmir; changing the nature of the LoC by allowing freer movement of goods and people across it; granting substantive and similar levels of autonomy on both sides of the LoC; creating a cross-LoC consultative mechanism to deepen cooperation on a range of issues; and reducing military forces on either side of the LoC after violence and terrorism come to an end.
But Musharraf was losing control of his country by 2007 and had little room for a bold initiative with India. Manmohan Singh later revealed that India was close to an ‘important breakthrough’ in the talks with Musharraf, just before the general’s power began to ebb.
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Still, the decade was ending on a relatively peaceful bilateral note as India and Pakistan celebrated their 60th anniversaries. The decade of Musharraf in Pakistan that had begun with aggression against India had ended with shifts in entrenched positions. The Vajpayee–Musharraf tango began in Agra in 2001, but was derailed by terrorism. It was some quiet diplomacy away from the public glare that had finally led to the breakthroughs for an era of relative peace from 2004. India had tried hard to do business with Pakistan’s dictator, primarily through a backchannel that continued the conversation for a lasting Kashmir solution, until it was abandoned with Pakistan’s internal turmoil in 2007. Pakistan also faced a backlash from the terror proxies it had created. The era of ‘good and bad terrorists’ had begun. Pakistan’s forces were hunting down the groups who were increasingly attacking Pakistan’s security forces, and protecting the ‘good terrorists’ who were being actively encouraged to focus their deadly talents on India.
This was an era when the two nuclear powers developed greater stakes in peace. Pakistan, under Musharraf, experimented with both Kashmir adventurism and terrorism under a nuclear umbrella. India had not made a judgement on Pakistan’s nuclear threshold, nor had it found the space for an answer for the asymmetric on-and-off proxy warfare coming from Pakistan. India’s tolerance of terrorism was diminishing yet was tempered by a desire to try to normalize the relationship. This would all change in the next decade, when events in Mumbai would harden India’s views on terrorism forever.
Massacre in Mumbai
The Mumbai attack soon crowded out all other bilateral issues between India and Pakistan, as it became the defining event of the decade for India and damaged the bilateral relationship in ways that were to become clear only in the coming years. The Musharraf four-point formula on Kashmir was not being discussed any more, even though the records of discussion had been shared with the army. Kayani appeared to have distanced himself from the backchannel initiatives. Husain Haqqani, the Pakistani ambassador in the US who came in for consultations in Islamabad in 2008, tried to look for the files but could not lay his hands on them. He was told the whole matter had been a personal initiative of Musharraf and no files were available.
The peace process that Manmohan Singh was continuing from Vajpayee’s last year, which Lambah had pursued on the backchannels, had proved resilient enough to withstand a severe shock of terrorism: the 2006 Mumbai train blasts. It also survived the Kabul blasts on the Indian embassy of July 2008. But it was overwhelmed by the shock of the Mumbai attacks. The peace process that had continued robustly from 2003 to 2006 was now clearly at a standstill. The central political assurance of 2004 that Musharraf had given to Vajpayee, to end terrorism from Pakistani soil, now lay in tatters. Mumbai’s trauma redefined the decade as one when India became more vulnerable to terrorism, but failed to quickly develop a credible strategy to deal with the issue.
Despite the surge in uncontrolled violence, Satyabrata Pal remained persuaded of the need for continuous engagement with Pakistan. He was a dove in the aviary of Indo–Pak engagement. His counterpart in Delhi, Shahid Malik, was also known as a peacenik. It was therefore ironic that the biggest terrorist blow on the bilateral relationship in the twenty-first century took place during the tenures of these two diplomats. Arguably, the presence of civilian ‘engagers’ on both sides hastened the diplomatic recovery, even if the trauma of the attack irretrievably damaged the trust.
High Commissioner Pal was arguing for continuing dialogue, making a sophisticated argument for sympathizing with Pakistan’s predicament:
Pakistanis feel that the world now sees them as mendicants with suicide belts on…Gandhi would have urged India to be generous for pity’s sake, but also in its self-interest, as he did when he went on his last fast, just months after the first war with Pakistan, to urge India to give Pakistan the 550 million that were its due… Since then, we have become more Chanakya’s disciples than Gandhi’s, but of the seven ways of dealing with neighbours the Arthashastra offered—samman, upeksha, bheda, maya, indrajala, danda and dana—(honour, overlook, divide, bribe, entrap, punish and pity). We have tried the first six, without much luck either. So, perhaps the time has come for us to marry Gandhi and Chanakya and try on Pakistan a selfish altruism, our dana, not a gift that can be turned against us, but a determined, hard-headed generosity that we can turn to our advantage.
But it was not selfish altruism that Indian policymakers needed to be deployed any longer.
Pal was conflating an engagement with Zardari as one with Pakistan’s foreign policy establishment. The message, however, needed to go directly to the army. India had failed to unambiguously impress upon Pakistan the unacceptable cost of terrorism. Public opinion dictated that they search for that elusive answer to cross-border terror, in the domain of what security analysts saw as sub-conventional warfare. India needed to inflict a cost for terrorism on the Pakistan establishment factoring in hardening public opinion and lowering thresholds of tolerance to terror attacks.
Another terror attack from Pakistan-based terrorist groups would inevitably come. It would need a different response. The policy would be given newer names from 2016—no talks with terror. Offensive defence. Surgical strikes. With the benefit of hindsight, it does appear, as I have said earlier, that if India had executed surgical or air strikes after Mumbai, these would have made for strong disincentives for later attacks by Pakistan in Pathankot, Uri, and Pulwama. It would not have just punished the civilian government of Zardari, but also the deep state.
For the world at large, the terrorism in South Asia seemed to be an aberration in the twenty-first century. The US engagement in Afghanistan had plateaued into a stalemate. Global leaders were fully occupied with the global financial crisis, which began with the fall of Lehman Brothers in 2008; geoeconomics seem to be triumphing over geopolitics. It was a time for the G20 to step up as the premier global economic forum to try to save the world; India was a member and its economist leader, Manmohan Singh, the star. Regressive violent developments in South Asia were distracting the world from that agenda. And Pakistan was to blame.
Within Pakistan, the Mumbai attacks had exacerbated civil–military tension. The Zardari regime was deeply embarrassed, and initially denied any links between the perpetrators and Pakistan. Ajmal Kasab, the lone living terrorist arrested by India, was not accepted as a Pakistani citizen; his family, when journalists unearthed them in Pakistan’s south Punjab, was whisked away into the custody of the ISI. But the government soon succumbed to global pressure and raided the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s hideout on 7 December.
Delhi Durbar
On 3 January 2014, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh revealed that India and Pakistan had been ‘on the verge of a historic deal on Jammu and Kashmir’1 , and at one time in his tenure, it appeared that an ‘important breakthrough was in sight’. He attributed the failure to get there to Musharraf’s exit from power. Singh was reflecting on his legacy at a press conference, having decided not to contest elections any longer. He added wistfully that he hoped to go to Pakistan, the land of his birth, even before elections in May 2014. Singh’s former minister, Natwar Singh recalled in his memoirs that each time Manmohan Singh wanted to visit Pakistan, ‘an anti-Indian incident took place’2 . The frequent acts of terrorism, the resulting strong national sentiment against the neighbour, and Musharraf’s political demise, all conspired against Singh from triumphantly visiting the land of his birth and returning with a peace deal to solve a sixty-year-old problem.
In Pakistan, some commentators had been offering gratuitous advice on an itinerary for Singh: it should involve a visit to the birthplace of Guru Nanak, Nankana Sahib near Lahore, Panja Sahib near Rawalpindi, the shrine believed to have an imprint of Guru Nanak’s hand, where ‘apart from India–Pakistan peace, Dr Singh needs to pray hard to minimise the embarrassment that awaits his party in the April-May 2014 general elections in India’. Dr Singh, a Dawn commentator suggested, must also ‘visit Gurudwara Dera Baba Nanak at Kartarpur in Sialkot. This gurudwara is just three kilometres from the Indian border at Jammu. Dr Singh could persuade Pakistan to create a visa-free zone for Sikh pilgrims to visit Kartarpur Sahib when they like’. And he could also visit the village of his birth, Gah in district Chakwal, and meet his old schoolmates.
As Manmohan Singh prepared to leave office, Nawaz Sharif was pressing ahead firmly with the trade agenda. Pakistan had even decided to accord MFN status to India, in a cabinet meeting held in March 2014. The MFN clause now had a more politically palatable name—NDMA (non-discriminatory market access). But India was already in election mode. A new Pakistani high commissioner took over in New Delhi in March and the issue landed on his table. Abdul Basit recounted the events in his 2021 memoir, Hostility: A Diplomat’s Diary on Pakistan-India Relations:
Our Commerce Minister, Khurram Dastagir Khan, had visited New Delhi in January and it was decided that Pakistan would extend the NDMA to India soon. For this purpose, his Indian counterpart, Anand Sharma, was very keen to visit Pakistan at the earliest, that is, prior to general elections that were being held in several phases in April/May 2014. While the dates for his visit to Pakistan were being worked out, I was approached by a person…who claimed to be a close friend of both Mohan Bhagwat, Chief of RSS, and the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi. I invited him for lunch on 1 April… He contended that granting NDMA to the outgoing Congress government would be wasteful. Islamabad should defer the matter. Since the BJP would most likely form the next government, it would make eminent sense to oblige the incoming set-up. This would help make a good beginning…I finally wrote to Islamabad that postponing the NDMA would be wise as the Congress party was in deep water and in no position to win for a third consecutive time.
The article is an excerpt from the book Anger management: The troubled diplomatic relationship between India and Pakistan written by Ajay Bisaria.