James Bonds of India and Pakistan

Statecraft

HAPPYMON JACOB

The story of India-Pakistan relations can be narrated as a series of incidents, accidents and unfortunate events and their intended or unintended consequences. The normalization process that was taking place between the two sides came to a grinding halt when a number of Indian and Pakistani soldiers were killed by each other along the Line of Control in January this year. Neither Islamabad nor New Delhi planned the LoC incident nor did they want its consequences to thwart the dialogue process. Relations between the two neighbours have since been cold but cordial. Both the capitals were indeed awaiting the election results in Pakistan to rejig their diplomatic toolboxes to restart diplomatic negotiations, till of course the recent frenzy over Sarabjit Singh’s killing begun. 

Impact on Indo-Pak relations
The killing of Indian prisoner Sarabjit Singh in a Lahore Prison and the murderous attack on a Pakistani prisoner, Sanaullah Ranjay, in a Jammu prison, clearly in retaliation, are unlikely to derail the India-Pakistan peace process - only because there is none to be derailed. What the two countries have at the moment is a politically dispirited and diplomatically unpersuasive set of reluctant engagements. That, in a sense, is the good news. The bad news is that this nationalistic hysteria and media frenzy created by these two attacks, mostly in India and much less in Pakistan thanks to the election fever there, will further weaken the already feeble faith that a lot of Indians and Pakistanis have in a peace process. It will highlight the already prevalent feeling that no improvement is possible between the two countries. Status quo ante will be the default wisdom for the two countries in managing their relations in the near future. If stray incidents and unfortunate developments can derail a well-designed dialogue process, why invest so much in such accident-prone processes in the first place? 

Own up your people
India and Pakistan go to absurd levels to achieve deniability about what they do to each other. On this count, Pakistan clearly outsmarts India. During the height of the Kargil war, Pakistan, to the dismay and shock of many well-meaning Pakistani themselves, refused to own up that their soldiers were fighting and dying in hundreds in the killing fields of Kargil as they did when the Pakistani regulars stormed into Kashmir in the guise of Pathan tribals in October 1947. When Surjeet Singh was released from a Pakistani jail in 2012 after 30 years, he came back to India and publically announced: “I was a RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) agent. No one bothered about me after I got arrested. Don't ask me too much...” While in Pakistan, he had claimed, as was to be expected, that he had strayed into Pakistan by mistake. By most accounts, Sarabjeet Singh was also an Indian spy who did what he did in Pakistan. Going by the Indian accounts, Sanaullah Ranjay, who is currently battling for life in Chandigarh hospital, was operating in J&K at the behest of Pakistan based organisations. 

Covertly operating on foreign soil, let us face it, is something that most countries engage in. There is nothing abnormal or new about it even as it could be seen as unacceptable. What is sad about these cases is that both the countries refuse to recognize that they engage in spying on each other and by implication refuse to demand for the release of their operatives from each other’s jails. There must be an honorable ay of dealing with this problem. During the Cold war, the Americans and Soviets had large numbers of spies in each other soil. However, unlike India and Pakistan, they often actively campaigned to secure the release of their agents, mostly through backchannel negotiations and quid-pro-quo offers: sometimes the acknowledgement was indeed public.   

The Central and Punjab governments have now promised financial and other forms of compensation for Sarabjit’s family. If Sarabjit was not working for the government agencies, what makes his family eligible for any compensation? Is it because he was killed in a Pakistani jail? Why would the Indian government award such huge compensation when a common Indian man gets killed in a Pakistan jail? Indeed, the incident has invited a comment even from an otherwise silent Prime Minister who said: “The criminals responsible for the barbaric and murderous attack on him must be brought to justice”. The Indian media, even it huffs and puffs about Sarabjit’s killing, refuses to talk about him being a spy! It is difficult to imagine that the Central and state governments in India are compensating Sarabjit just because he was killed in a Pakistan prison. 

Instead of merely throwing money at his family, government of India should have the guts to acknowledge that he worked for an Indian agency. Indeed, both India and Pakistan should engage each other in a purposeful manner with regard to the release of their operatives languishing in each other’s prisons. 

Indo-Pak Judicial Committee on Prisoners
According to a government of India statement, “there are 535 Indian prisoners (including 483 fishermen) in Pakistani jails and a total of 272 Pakistani prisoners in Indian jails”. The Indo-Pak Judicial Committee on Prisoners, established in 2007, has managed to do some good work in the last few years in securing release of prisoners held in each other’s jails. There is an urgent need to reinvigorate this committee, and the governments on both sides should further strengthen the committee so that at least those prisoners who have completed their sentences and are eagerly awaiting their release should be allowed to go to their respective countries.  

(SOurce: Greater Kashmir, May 5, 2013. URL: http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2013/May/5/james-bonds-of-india-and-pakistan-6.asp )

Procrastination as grand strategy

Statecraft

HAPPYMON JACOB

There is something about us as a nation that makes our officials, politicians, and strategic thinkers unwilling to take decisions on major issues of national importance. Be it resolving conflicts, reforming the judiciary or the police force, restructuring the country’s civil services or making well thought out long-term strategies for defending and securing the country. When Pakistan watchers tell me that Pakistan’s grand strategy vis-à-vis India in Kashmir has gone completely wrong, I tell them, in jest, that India’s grand strategy can never go wrong because it simply does not have one. I increasingly realize that there is more than humour in such an argument – we as a country are simply unwilling to take major decisions. Procrastination seems to be the organizing logic of our national grand strategy. But why? 

Before I attempt to understand why, let me look at a few cases. My colleague at JNU, Rajesh Rajagopalan has argued, in his research work on insurgencies in India, that “The Indian state has always seen counter-insurgency as a political rather than a military problem, and it has insisted that the Indian Army accept it as such”. However, even as Rajagopalan focuses on India’s emphasis on the political nature of the solution, he highlights the importance of the time factor: “it is clear from the Indian experience that patience and a long-term perspective are essential attitudinal requirements in fighting counter-insurgency campaigns. What is not so clear is whether New Delhi chose patience from foresight, or whether it simply preferred to ignore difficult situations until, with the fullness of time, they resolved themselves.” I tend to broadly agree with the argument that Rajagopalan makes.

What is interesting to note here is that while the Indian state clearly understands that the solution for resolving insurgencies has to be political and not military, they are still unwilling to make those political concessions to end insurgencies. They, as Rajagopalan puts it, wait for it to resolve themselves in the fullness of time. To my mind, this is a classic case of procrastination, unwilling to take steps to resolve issues even when opportunities present themselves to do so. 

Kashmir, for instance, was ripe for resolution during the 2004-2008 peace process between India and Pakistan: New Delhi developed cold feet by early 2007 for no substantive reason and postponed the decision to finalise the deal on Kashmir with Pakistan, after having drawn up a historic deal, according to insiders’ accounts. In 2010, during the height of the uprising in Kashmir, New Delhi appointed a team of interlocutors who produced an exhaustive report which produced an array of recommendations for resolving the Kashmir issue: the government has since been silent about the report. The Government of India, at the initiative or the Prime Minister, organised a series of Round Table conferences on Kashmir during 2006-2007 and five working groups were formed to look into the various aspects of a resolution of the Kashmir issue: reports have been submitted to the government, but no action taken. 
These were indeed many excellent opportunities for resolving the Kashmir issue and yet no action was taken beyond merely initiating half-baked ‘political steps’ towards the resolution of the country’s most intractable insurgency. Today, faced with impending political uncertainty due to elections in India, Pakistan and Kashmir, and increasing instability in the region thanks to the US-NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan beginning 2014 Indian policy makers are reduced to crystal gazing to understand what might happen to Kashmir in the days to come. 

I do agree that dialogue and political reconciliation lay at the heart of the Indian state’s approach to conflict resolution and problem solving. India’s political culture and its national security policies, despite a large number of aberrations and shortcomings, still exhibit a certain tolerance of diversity and difference, non-violent approaches to dealing with social unrest and a celebration of political debates and disputations on deeply contested issues. That is certainly welcome and should be preserved. In other words, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the Indian state is likely to deal with most problems politically and non-violently. 

Why then do we see such appallingly numerous instances of human rights violations and political unwillingness to resolve political issues around the country especially in Kashmir? Even if the argument is true that at the end of the day the Indian state will resolve political problems politically, why does it take a violent, intolerant and muddled road to that destination? One explanation could be that the government is too busy managing too many day to day problems, and in a huge country like India there are far too many problems and hence it has no time to resolve deeply contested political issues. But that is an excuse, not an explanation. 

I am persuaded to accept a slightly more long-winding explanation. Clearly, as pointed out above, when dealing with problems such as insurgencies, Indian government’s efforts are marked by extreme levels of procrastination in deciding to negotiate a political resolution to resolve the conflict. During this period there is hardly any willingness on the part of the political or bureaucratic elite to take steps to resolve the conflict as creative, out of the box solutions to political problems are systemically disincentivised in our country. If that is the case, how can one make the argument that the insurgencies usually end with the implementation of a political solution? I would argue (and Rajagopalan indirectly refers to it in his writings) that the belief in the need to resolve conflicts using political strategies do not seem to operate at the conscious level of the political and bureaucratic leadership. The willingness to opt for political resolution of insurgencies comes from the country’s political and strategic cultures. Since this operates at the subconscious level, making it the default culturally acceptable solution, this can’t be termed as a strategy: it can at best be referred to as a product of deeply held political and strategic beliefs.

(Source: Greater Kashmir, 28 APril, 2013. URL: http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2013/Apr/28/procrastination-as-grand-strategy-11.asp )