SOUTH ASIA: Assassination Bids on Musharraf Throw Hex on Summit

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Dec 27 2003 (IPS) - This month’s two assassination bids on Pakistan President Gen Pervez Musharraf have cast a long shadow over the January summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), easily one of the most jinxed of regional groupings. The heads of state of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives are scheduled to meet in Islamabad on Jan. 4 and 6 in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

But the assassination attempts on Musharraf on Dec. 14 and 25 have raised questions on the participation of Pakistan’s arch rival India, whose officials are worried about security considerations. The South Asian summit is due to take place after several years, getting underway in a mood of apparent reconciliation between India and Pakistan.

Hopes are high that amid this more conducive environment, the summit would allow the smaller members of SAARC a chance to address serious socio-economic problems facing the 1.5 billion people who live in one of the world’s poorest regions. In a bid to allay apprehensions on whether the summit would take place at all – India’s non-participation would certainly scuttle it – Pakistan’s foreign secretary Riaz Khokar announced at a news conference in Islamabad on Saturday that ”there has been absolutely no change of plans”. Khokar, who served a term as Pakistan’s high commissioner in New Delhi, was emphatic that there would be ”tight and stringent security arrangements during the entire summit period”. There was, however, no official word yet on India’s participation. This must await the recommendations of a high-level meeting of the country’s security establishment, which was convened Saturday by the principal secretary Brajesh Mishra – the country’s most powerful bureaucrat and national security adviser. Within hours of the Christmas Day assassination attempt, the second in the cantonment town of Rawalpindi in 11 days, Indian foreign ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna condemned in a statement the ”heinous terrorist attack against President Musharraf in Rawalpindi which took many innocent lives and injured a large number of civilians”. The official statement curiously omitted his army rank of general, mention of which usually serves as a subtle but convenient reminder that the president heads what is essentially a military government. While most analysts in India believe that the attacks are the handiwork of extremist elements, it is unclear if they were a reaction to Musharraf’s compliance with directives from the United States that he crack down hard on elements of the Taliban or to his newly softened stand on the long-disputed territory of Kashmir, or both. Musharraf recently made – then retracted – a statement that Pakistan was willing, as a mark of ”flexibility” toward India, to drop its long-standing demand that the future of Kashmir be decided by a U.N.-mandated plebiscite in the Muslim-majority territory. Some Indian leaders and analysts have taken the view that Musharraf only has himself to blame for the assassination bids and that they are the direct result of Islamabad’s support for Islamic extremism as ‘an instrument of state policy’. ”We have been publicly telling Pakistan that those who start terrorism can end up facing it themselves,” Defence Secretary George Fernandes said on Saturday.

He was visiting army formations close to the Indo-Pakistan border, where a ceasefire has been in place since Nov. 24 as part of a series of confidence building measures ahead of the SAARC summit. By its charter, SAARC avoids contentious bilateral issues. But Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has said the summit did offer a ”good beginning” as well as a chance to see if Pakistan was ”serious about giving up an attitude of enmity towards India”. P R Chari of the independent Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS) told IPS in an interview that he was not at all surprised by the assassination bids that he saw as a direct consequence of Musharraf’s complicated game of ”running with the hares and hunting with the hounds”. ”Pretty obviously the ‘jihadists’ have seen through this game,” said Chari, who expressed scepticism as to whether Vajpayee would now attend the summit at all. According to Chari, the main reason why SAARC has never quite taken off is Pakistan’s attempts to use it as ”yet another international forum for anti-India propaganda” and ”settle the Kashmir dispute on its own line of thinking”. India, he maintained, would be better off concentrating on ”subregional cooperation” with other members of SAARC and alternately concentrate on other regional groupings such as the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN) or BIMSTEC, the acronym for the Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand – Economic Cooperation. For its part, Pakistan has accorded more importance to its relations with Islamic countries to its west and north including Afghanistan, Iran and the oil-rich sheikhdoms, although its shares deep historic and cultural ties India and other members of SAARC. Whether or not Vajpayee goes to Islamabad, he is committed to attend the BIMSTEC’s first ever summit in Thailand’s resort town of Phuket in early February. This is in keeping with India’s new ‘Look East’ policy that is opposed to the peninsula’s traditional focus of economic and other activity along its western seaboard. Bhutan and Nepal have already applied to join BIMSTEC and their entry can only serve to hasten the demise of SAARC, already held hostage by India-Pakistan rivalry.

”India will strongly support the entry of Bhutan and Nepal into BIMSTEC at the summit,” said an official as if to emphasise the new policy. Another security analyst, Brahma Chellaney of the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), says that SAARC lacked vibrancy and dynamism. It is time that India looked beyond the immediate region and invested political capital in ”processes and initiatives that have a future”, Chellaney explained. Chellaney is opposed to India’s participation at the upcoming Islamabad summit in the first place, saying it would only accord ”respectability to Pakistan’s military rulers.”