INDIA-PAKISTAN: Bus Diplomacy Welcome, Despite Limits

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Praful Bidwai

NEW DELHI, Feb 19 1999 (IPS) - India’s Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee will make history on Saturday with his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif, when he travels to Pakistan by bus.

As the first head of state to cross the land border to Pakistan, Vajpayee and Sharif’s “bus diplomacy” is one of the best things to have happened to the bitter rivals in three decades, since they last fought a war in 1971.

It marks a thawing of their mutual icy relations, which is a welcome sign. But whether or not it leads to substantive results in the form of resolution of some of their numerous disputes remains unclear.

On Feb. 20, Vajpayee will take the inaugural bus from Delhi to Lahore – a four-times-a-week service the two governments have started – and be treated to what Sharif promises to be an “unforgettable” welcome.

The two leaders – Vajpayee from a Hindu right-wing party and Sharif from the pro-Islamic Muslim League – will hold two rounds of discussions, the first such talks between the prime ministers to be held in either India or Pakistan in 10 years.

The need to mend strained relations has become imperative for both governments under international pressure to observe mutual strategic restraint and prove that they can reduce high levels of hostility post-May 1998.

In addition both prime ministers want to score over their domestic rivals and gain some public goodwill by defusing tension, at least in some areas. Both are thus driven by political self-interest.

In both India and Pakistan, large numbers of people are fed up with the age-old mutual enmity and sabre-rattling that their governments whip up to obscure their own misgovernance and domestic policy failures.

All the recent opinion polls, from resolutions of the Pakistan-India Forum for Peace and Democracy (which has held two citizens’ conventions in each country since 1995), and from Track-II exchanges between diplomats, military leaders and non- governmental groups, indicate a high level of support for peace.

The 1990s have seen more cultural exchanges across the border than any other decade. There have been dialogues involving trade unionists, between industry leaders, among social scientists, and most impressive, between schoolchildren in Bombay and Karachi.

Such people-to-people exchanges will grow as the Delhi-Lahore bus starts plying regularly between the two cities, a distance of 450-kms, and closer than parts of India are to the capital city.

The bus service is likely to prompt a demand for liberalising the present, extremely strict, visa regime, and for reopening the Bombay and Karachi consulates which were closed down in 1993.

Talks over the weekend between the prime minister of India and Pakistan are expected to result in some progress in the field of economic cooperation. Both sides would like to formalise the huge clandestine trade between them which runs at 2 billion dollars a year, or over 10 times India’s exports to Pakistan.

Last October, their foreign secretaries held negotiations on six different issues, but failed to achieve results. Among them are three boundary demarcation and water-sharing disputes, one of them on the Siachen glacier, at 6,000 metres.

India and Pakistan are fighting the world’s most expensive, brutal and irrational high-altitude war at Siachen. Although they twice came close to a solution, they failed to clinch it because of lack of mutual political confidence.

Even if these disputes are now resolved, two other issues will prove thorny: Kashmir and nuclearisation. Kashmir has always been a bone of contention. India is reluctant even to admit it is a “dispute”. And for many Pakistanis, Kashmir represents the “K” in Pakistan’s primary identity; it is part of the “unfinished agenda” of Partition.

If Kashmir is taken up up-front in the coming talks, there is little likelihood of progress. Pakistani moderates and India favour a graduated approach: solve the easier disputes first, take up Kashmir later. Hardliners in Islamabad, including Foreign Minister Sartaz Aziz, want Kashmir to be addressed right now.

Nuclearisation is deeply fraught too. The crossing of the nuclear threshold has not impelled either government to become sober. They have not even begun to acknowledge the risks and dangers of nuclearisation.

The two governments might at best agree on some limited confidence-building measures, like not to bomb each other’s

nuclear facilities and civilian targets, without frontally addressing issues of nuclear restraint.

However, deep uncertainties and ambiguities still remain, which make for instability in strategic equations. Their rulers and generals have little confidence in, or firm knowledge of, each other’s capabilities, preparations or doctrines.

This spells a grave danger which can only be eliminated if the two do not make and induct nuclear weapons. There are no signs yet that they are interested in such restraint. There might lie the limits of “bus diplomacy”, welcome as it is.