India must give peace with Pakistan a chance

Why has India's senior most government official questioned former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto's ability to live up to her promises a little more than a fortnight before landmark elections in this critical South Asian nation could, in all probability, see her voted back to power for a third term?

India's National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan in an interview to private channel CNN-IBN said "Her track record is not necessarily something which will make us believe that she would follow to the letter of what she has said - I think even if she wishes to do so ... the single most important entity in Pakistan remains the army and along with that ISI.

"I find it extremely difficult to believe that prime minister Benazir Bhutto, if she becomes that, will have a free hand in doing all the things that she wishes to do."

There was more. "I know that in 1988 when she met with prime minister Rajiv Gandhi she made a number of promises. We know almost certainly that she was sort of curbed by the military at that point but whether she will have success now is difficult to believe and it would be very optimistic to expect that she can fulfil whatever she says but we hope that she will do her best."

Youthful leaders

Narayanan's reference to a seminal meeting between the youthful leaders in December of 1988 has irked the Pakistani opposition leader enough to air the little known details of that one-on-one.

It was an interaction that raised huge hopes that years of mistrust would finally fade, as both leaders brought a fresh approach to problems that bedeviled India-Pakistan relations.

Despite being in the thick of a campaign that may lack the colour and even the venom of elections in India or the United States (where Hillary Clinton's appearance seems more important than her intellect), Bhutto is quick to pick up on the implications of the Narayanan assessment that she is no true friend of India.

And firmly insisting she is a factor for peace and stability in India-Pakistan relations.

In fact, it was the youthful Bhutto whose reported handing over of a dossier carrying hundreds of names of Sikh operatives and their handlers to the Rajiv Gandhi government effectively severed the Sikh head from its Pakistani host.

That she subsequently looked the other way when her country's agencies unleashed its "bleed India through a thousand cuts" infiltration that was sought to be passed off as a home grown insurgency in Kashmir has always been held against her. Was it a quid pro quo?

In her defence, Bhutto was completely outmanoeuvred by the entrenched military establishment which repeatedly undermined her by refusing to kowtow to a woman as head of the armed forces and head of government of an Islamic country.

It set the terms for an unsubtle confrontation where she was frequently presented with difficult choices on what was in Pakistan's national interest.

As she recounts in her book Daughter of the East when then Director of Military Operations Major General Pervez Musharraf laid out his plans to send Pakistani troops into Kargil, she refused to accept the plan that he later set in motion in 1999.

That in her second term she was widely seen as having compromised with the military to stay in office allowing the rise of the Kashmir insurgency and the Taliban is equally well documented.

India's concern as events in neighbouring Pakistan seem to regress to the discredited troika formula is that as in the past, when the military genus enforced its writ, peace with India could become an all too easy casualty.

Sacrificed at the altar of expediency if the military decides the time for talking is over. And that President Pervez Musharraf's 180 degree turnaround on Kashmir has lost traction with India unable to make any reciprocal concessions.

The Benazir-Rajiv connection where her "give" on the Sikh insurgency was to be followed by Rajiv's "take" on a pull-out from Siachen in 1988 (how he was going to sell that to the Indian army is another question) resurrected the spirit of the Simla agreement of 1972.

Indian officials aver Indira Gandhi emerged from her one-on-one with Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto with an agreement from the Pakistani leader that the Line of Control would be the accepted boundary between the two nations even if India had altered the status quo to its satisfaction.

The senior Bhutto subsequently dismissed such reports as untrue.

Similarly, concessions - if any - during former Pakistan premier Nawaz Sharif's meetings with Indian prime ministers Inder Gujral in the Maldives and Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Colombo that led to the Lahore summit were reversed by Musharraf's Kargil misadventure.

By his public rebuke, Narayanan may have been sending an unambiguous if unpleasant message that India will not countenance a return to the time that sees a stepped up covert destabilisation. It's a timely reminder.

But Bhutto's riposte to India of what is possible when there is a meeting of minds is a pointer that Delhi must also give a democratically elected government under an older and wiser Bhutto or for that matter Sharif, a fighting chance.

Neena Gopal is an analyst on Asia.