POLITICS: Indo-Pakistan Cold War Overshadows South Asian Summit

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Dec 30 2001 (IPS) - Yet another summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) has been jeopardized by hostilities between India and Pakistan, the two largest members of the seven-nation regional grouping.

The fly in the ointment this time is the aborted attempt by five members of a suicide squad to blow up the sprawling, sandstone building which houses India’s Parliament. This ornate edifice was built by British colonials 80 years ago as the Central Legislative Assembly for territories that later became Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

In all, 14 people died in the Dec 13 attack, foiled after security personnel fought a pitched gun-battle outside the several entrances to the circular building. The dead included all the members of the suicide squad who were identified by Indian police as Pakistan nationals.

The upshot is that the background for the scheduled Jan 4-6 summit in Kathmandu, the first in the new millennium, is provided by the spectacle of the two quarrelsome neighbours imposing sanctions against each other and amassing troops along their 1,800 mile long border.

Far from SAARC’s objective of fostering historic and cultural affinity and promoting regional cooperation, the two countries are now assessing how much economic damage has been inflicted mutually by Thursday’s tit-for-tat ban on civilian flights over each other’s territory.

Both Pakistan President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee have confirmed that they would attend the summit but there is little chance of them meeting on the sidelines.

Already the summit is overdue by two years. India requested the original Dec.1999 date postponed because of the military coup in Pakistan which saw Musharraf seizing power from former prime minister Nawaz Sharief in October that year.

Apart from Nepal, where SAARC is to have its permanent secretariat, the other members are Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Bhutan and Bangladesh.

On Friday, India said it would allow Pakistan President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and his delegation to fly over India to reach Kathmandu for the summit in a slight easing of a diplomatic offensive aimed at getting Islamabad to hand over for trial jehadist leaders allegedly behind the Dec. 13 attack.

India has also announced that it would extend by five days a Jan. 1 deadline it had set for halving the number of personnel in each other’s missions both of which have been unilaterally downgraded by India to the level of deputy high commissioner.

While SAARC summits are supposed to avoid contentious bilateral issues, the special focus on terrorism at Kathmandu could prove explosive in the current Indo-Pakistan context. Already the Indian side wants to include “cross-border” in a proposed resolution on terrorism.

India accuses Pakistan of supporting armed separatist militancy in the Indian state of Kashmir, the possession of which has been disputed since independence from Britain and partition in 1947.

Musharraf has referred to the Kashmir issue as the “unfinished business of Partition” and has called the militants “freedom fighters.”

But Musharraf has condemned the Dec. 13 attack on the Indian parliament and clamped down on two jehadist organizations named by India as responsible for it – the Jaish-e-Mohammed (Army of Mohammed) and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (Soldiers of God).

The United States, which depends heavily on Pakistan in its “war against terrorism” in Afghanistan, declared the two organizations as terrorist outfits on Wednesday.

Apart from terrorism the summit is due to discuss a boost in regional trade from the present 3.4 percent of global trade, through the establishment of a South Asia Free Trade Area (SAFTA).

India already accords most favoured nation status to Pakistan but this has not been matched by Islamabad mostly as a result of the conflict over Kashmir.

Relations between India and Pakistan have proved so inimical to regional cooperation in what is one of the world’s poorest regions and home to a fifth of humanity that diplomats have even suggested the creation of an alternate trading group that excludes Pakistan.

SAARC summits in the past have been threatened by the May 1998 tit-for-tat nuclear tests that the two countries set off and by the 1999 undeclared war that the two countries fought at Kargil on the Line of Control (LoC), which divides Kashmir into the Pakistan- and the Indian-controlled halves.

On the other hand the 1998 summit in Colombo actually improved rapport between Sharief and Vajpayee and paved the way for the bus ride that Vajpayee undertook to Lahore in Feb. 1999. Critics say the Pakistan army, led by Musharraf, was even then plotting the massive armed incursion over the LoC which led to the Kargil war.

Similarly a summit in 1986 held in the southern Indian city of Bangalore helped improve relations between India and Sri Lanka which had soured over New Delhi’s support for Tamil rebels on the island.

“We hope the Kathmandu summit will help ease tensions between India and Pakistan,” Nepal’s Finance Minister Ram Sharan Mahat, an ardent advocate of SAFTA, was quoted as saying when the Programme Committee of SAARC began its two-day meeting on Friday.

He said the important thing was that the summit was being held in spite of the tension between India an Pakistan and that the regional cooperation process was being reactivated after more than three years.

Mahat said he hoped that the summit would tackle terrorism in a meaningful way. SAARC signed a convention on terrorism in 1987 but members have admitted that implementation has been unsatisfactory.

Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh said at a press conference on Thursday that talks with Pakistan were neither “practical nor possible” in the present situation while officials ruled out a one-on-one meeting between Vajpayee and Musharraf.

“It is Pakistan which is the epicentre of terrorism in the region and refuses to recognise the ramifications of that situation and the gravity with which India views this entire matter (the Dec 13 attack on Parliament),” a spokesperson said.