Managing PakistanReviewing Ajay Bisaria’s Anger Management and Vijay Gokhale’s Crosswinds
TCA Raghavan
Anger Management is a history of India-Pakistan diplomacy from its earliest days. In the numerous books on this theme, Bisaria’s work is distinctive not least because he has been the Indian high commissioner to Pakistan and to date the only one who has been expelled.
That distinction followed as part of the package of Pakistan’s reactions to the legislative changes with regard to Jammu and Kashmir in August 2019, which led them to downgrade diplomatic relations. During Bisaria’s tenure in Islamabad, another low point had been the Pulwama terrorist attack followed by the Balakot air strike. If all this suggests a monochromatic relationship of unadulterated negativism, it was also the case that work on the Kartarpur Sahib visa-free corridor began and continued uninterrupted in this period through all the nosedives in the relationship.
Bisaria’s narration of how he experienced the buildup of the crisis from the time the news of the Pulwama terrorist attack spread makes for fascinating reading. Similarly, his account of Pakistan’s reactions to the J&K legislative changes of August 2019 leading finally to his expulsion and other measures reveals a great deal about Kashmir or the ‘K factor’ in Pakistan’s politics. Anger Management is, however, much more than a firsthand account of his tenure in Pakistan—although those details are there. It is also a reflective and analytical effort to decipher the trajectory of the relationship by looking at its history and then realistically assessing the possibilities of its moving in the future from “a securitised hostile relationship to a normalised, if not friendly, one”.
Bisaria’s 20-month experience in Pakistan ending with his expulsion made him embark on this book with the aim of putting at its centre stage diplomats like himself who experience firsthand the occasional highs and the more frequent deep lows of this turbulent relationship. So, the book’s principal protagonists are Bisaria’s predecessors, some of whom also left detailed accounts of their own impressions and experiences of the relationship, frequently posing much the same questions that Bisaria grapples with. Not infrequently, the dilemmas and the situations encountered were also similar. Looking at the past through the distillate of his own experience enables Bisaria to make a somewhat depressing diplomatic history come alive.
This deep dive into India-Pakistan diplomacy combined with Bisaria’s reflections on the present impasse also makes for an unusually thoughtful and timely work from a policy perspective. It undoubtedly merits a close and appreciative read by the specialist as well as the general reader.
The author, a former foreign secretary, has post-retirement directed his accumulated experience and knowledge of China into three well-received books on China’s political evolution and on the China-India interface. This is his fourth and is somewhat different being an immersion into the archives of four inter-governmental relationships in the 1950s: between China, the US, Britain and India. The context is the post-World War II world with an ascendant US and Britain in decline but seeking to retain influence in China and Southeast Asia. The US increasingly viewed China through the prism of the Cold War: a Communist power to be confronted or contained. The British favoured compromise and not confrontation given their economic interests in China. This meant, in effect, an Anglo-US competition over China and the Far East.
Gokhale’s thesis is that this competition deeply impacted India as it sought to fashion an independent foreign policy in which China was seen as a natural partner. This thesis is examined with regard to a cluster of four specific events, each of which was a milestone in the 1950s: the recognition of the Communist government in China in 1949; the Indo-China crisis and its resolution in the Geneva Conference in 1954; and two crises in the Taiwan Straits in 1954-55 and 1958.
This thought-provoking historical work is empirically dense, but Gokhale’s basic approach is also that of a policy practitioner. Like all good history books, this can therefore be read allegorically, in which case, certain ‘lessons’ are also evident. In Gokhale’s account through the 1950s, India’s leadership displayed strategic clarity and common sense in defining its national interests. Yet, this strategic vision was not always accompanied by the framing of sound and actionable policy objectives. Thus, recognising the People’s Republic of China without first ensuring that potential trouble spots like the boundary issue were ironed out was a mistake. Gokhale also argues that diplomacy was often “driven less by systemic consultation than by individual preference”. And finally, and most significantly, is the matter of prevalent mindsets. A pre-inclination to think as the British did was perhaps inevitable but this did make India more vulnerable to manipulation and deception. Similarly, India too readily assumed an alignment of interest between China and India and only gradually woke up to existing realities.
All history is vulnerable to the charge of retrospection, yet lessons such as these extracted from the archives of the 1950s make this a fascinating study to read, absorb and re-read. As Gokhale notes, “Hindsight might be a useful guide” to avoid repeating past errors.