A chance to rewrite Indo-Pak history

At last, India's bureaucracy has been upstaged by none other than Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Returning from Japan - India's newly minted friend and partner, in the wake of the galvanising Indo-US relationship -over the weekend, Singh was asked for his response to Pakistan's President General Pervez Musharraf's proposals to resolve Kashmir.

I welcome them, said the Indian prime minister, himself a refugee from Pakistan's Jhang district and keenly aware that economic prosperity on both sides of the Radcliffe Line could go a long way in mitigating the trauma of the religious partition of the subcontinent.

They are new ideas, he went on to add, putting all those off-the-record naysayers wanting to shoot the messenger (Musharraf) along with the message (how to resolve the Kashmir dispute) in the shade.

It is true that the mild-mannered Singh could have made the same general comments in response to any subject under the sun. After all, his couple of sentences on Pakistan's Kashmir ideas did not either classify as world-class literature or path-breaking discourse.

And yet, Singh clearly chose his words with care. He did not dismissively point out that these ideas were hardly new - after all, his special envoy on Pakistan Satinder Lambah, who took over the job after the death of the redoubtable J.N. Dixit - had been discussing precisely these issues for the last 18 months or so with Musharraf's close friend and National Security Adviser Tariq Aziz.

He did not emphasise that Musharraf's musings were still a cliff and a chasm away from the Indian script, especially when it came to the joint management or supervision of both parts of Kashmir.

And significantly, he did not complain about the Pakistani president's bout of amnesia during the long interview on NDTV over terrorism or his special responsibility in ending the sponsorship of it inside India.

Encouraged

In the few words that he did speak - and he knew the world was waiting with bated breath to hear what he had to say - the prime minister showed that he spoke on behalf of the rest of India.

By generously acknowledging his adversary, Musharraf's comments as "new ideas", the prime minister encouraged him to stay the course of going where few Pakistani leaders had gone before.

Moreover, by restating his intention to visit Pakistan, in response to an invitation, Singh was also sending a message to his critics - both in the Opposition and at home - that a determined effort to the 59-year-old Kashmir dispute was being made. And if, God willing, a solution was soon in sight, he would travel to the other end of the world - namely, Islamabad - to seal it.

Indeed, Musharraf's comments and the follow up remarks by the Pakistani Foreign Office ("Pakistan never had a claim on Kashmir'') are path-breaking. In recent history, the path to peace with Pakistan has been littered with overwhelming obstacles, from Kargil to the Mumbai train blasts in July.

Point is, Musharraf, needed to publicly say to India that he and his country never had a claim on Kashmir. That's as close he will come to an apology, on behalf of Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan for the previous wars and on behalf of himself, for Kargil.

Clearly, Musharraf is making the ultimate turnaround in Pakistan's history. He can of course never dare to question the great Qaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah himself, for carving out another nation in the name of religion.

But by saying that Pakistan "never had'' or was now giving up, its claim on Kashmir, Musharraf is basically telling India that he's okay with a Muslim Kashmir remaining within a largely-Hindu India.

So what does that do to the infamous two-nation theory that has dogged the lives of the two ageing twins, India and Pakistan, violently separated at birth? Was the Kashmir insurgency, motivated, driven and funded by Pakistan's ISI since 1989 and picked up so seamlessly by "Indian'' Kashmiri boys, in which at least 50,000 people are believed to have died, was it worth it at all?

In January, when India's External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee visits Islamabad to invite Pakistan's Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz to the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) summit in New Delhi in the summer, both sides are expected to take the Lambah-Aziz dialogue forward.

Ice-breaker

In fact, Siachen could well become the ice-breaker that thaws the relationship. It's been four years since the guns at Siachen have remained silent. If India doesn't claim the Saltoro Ridge, where Indian soldiers have been perched west of the Siachen glacier since 1984, Islamabad could easily accede to the Indian demand by authenticating the ground positions of Indian troops on joint maps.

As for Musharraf, he seems poised to rewrite another chapter in the history of India and Pakistan.

Having trashed the Hudood ordinance, the Pakistani president is up against fundamentalists at home more than ever before. To be sure, he also plays the ISI both up north in Afghanistan as well as in the east in Kashmir. Singh's job is to tighten the noose, with a little help from the Americans, so that the returns from the ISI end are gradually negligible.

Dixit and Lambah, Tariq Aziz, Musharraf and Singh, all these names will one day be part of the great unfathomable. One of them already is. If the rest don't give history a shot, they can be sure history won't give them another chance.

Jyoti Malhotra is the Diplomatic Editor of Star News, India.