Pakistan’s federal cabinet approved today an agreement on a liberalized visa regime between Pakistan and India. The liberalized regime allows for issuance of visas to the elderly and children on arrival, facilitates group visas for tourists and allows for multi entry visas to businesspeople. This is good and means that the staggered approach to conflict resolution between the two countries is holding. It allows for people to people contacts which can potentially obviate and cancel out the prevailing stereotypes in the two countries about each other. Gradually, people across the divide may come to see each other as people and not as Indians or Pakistanis. This can potentially lead to bottoms up pressure on both countries for a comprehensive normalization of relations. It can also have other learning effects that can only be salubrious. This is much is well and good.
However, this raises a set of questions pertaining to the so called core issue between India and Pakistan. The reference is here to Kashmir. Why is Pakistan, despite its ostensible measures to seek and crystallize peace with India, continuing to push militants into Kashmir? Even the level of infiltration is low, what explains is? Is Pakistan being Janus faced and playing the same old game that it has become good at? If so, why? Will the infiltration pick up? What can and should be done to resolve the so called core issue and what tangible steps should and can Pakistan take toward a comprehensive settlement?
Explaining Pakistan’s infiltration attempts is not rocket science. The country obviously is desperate to have some traction and leverage on the dispute over Kashmir. Pushing militants into the valley and even low level acts of militancy can, in the Pakistani schema, allow Pakistan some leverage on Kashmir. The other explanatory variable is that even while some of the infiltration may enjoy the patronage of the Pakistani praetorian elite, some of it may be the initiatives of some of the militant outfits that the Pakistani state has cultivated and nourished. This does not mean that the state cannot control or curb this. The state can, if it chooses, put a stop to any kind of infiltration. The infiltration is then more or less a desperate measure made more salient and poignant by the fact that the conflict in Kashmir has transformed and mutated. Pakistan does not through its proxies have the same amount of leverage in the state of Jammu & Kashmir.
Low level militancy can be countenanced and even absorbed by the Indian state. It does not pose an existential threat. Pakistan then is playing a mug’s game. It should review and revise its approach and strategy and align it to the new equations-local, regional and global. What would this mean and entail? This means dropping its claim on Kashmir, dropping maximalism and arriving at a settlement with India that perhaps accords with the extant realities and the status quo. This will not be an easy task given that the conceptual dynamic of Pakistan is undergirded by the Kashmir obsession. This is overlain by the obsession of its people and society to wresting Kashmir from India.
Dropping the Kashmir obsession and arriving at a comprehensive and lasting settlement with India on Kashmir then almost amounts to a revolution and a paradigm shift. This is really difficult but not impossible. Nations and the principles and philosophies undergirding them are not static entities. They change and evolve. The trajectory of many nations is testimony to this. White Australia, for instance, has transformed into a multi cultural Australia where learning Asian languages is now mandatory. Pakistan can, for its own benefit, take a cue from this and evolve a new paradigm and conceptual dynamic that is in accord with the nature and mood of the times. This will not save it energy but allow the country to sublimate its energies toward endeavors that redound positively to it. This may mean swallowing the bitter pill but Pakistan has to, at some point in time, do it. This is in its own interest.
The Indian state should help and assist Pakistan in this. It can do so by allowing Pakistan a face saving exit from Kashmir which the country can then ‘sell’ it to its own people. Lots of blood and treasure has been expended on what essentially amounts to a Sisyphean endeavor. Let saner heads prevail and let a course correction and review be undertaken. This can be an unalloyed good for the peoples of the subcontinent. Let haste be made slowly and let peace and its concomitant , prosperity- the entitlement of the peoples of the subcontinent be allowed to crystallize and take root.
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