India’s Pakistan policy is hopelessly idealistic

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Most Indians will find it shocking that within a few weeks of Mumbai blasts, which put a question mark over India’s Pakistan policy, our political establishment has readily capitulated to the charm of Pakistan’s vivacious Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar by agreeing to discuss Kashmir issue on a forward-looking basis. It was as if the 34-year-old had spiked the collective adrenaline of India’s policy-makers and rendered them colour blind.

Despite shallow declarations of entering a “new era”, there is nothing in the joint communiqué issued after talks between the two foreign ministers that India had managed to extract any tangible concession from Pakistan in its war against terror. On the other hand, Khar seems to have staged a diplomatic coup of sorts in her maiden sojourn to India and outwitted and bewitched her supposedly seasoned counterpart, S M Krishna. This is not surprising. For India’s Pakistan policy continues to be held hostage to the present Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s fixated obsession for “peace with Pakistan at any cost”. In strategic and political realistic terminology it amounts to “Pakistan appeasement”.

The generation of Indians in their 60s and 70s may find it galling that they are being reduced to mute spectators of such a knee-jerk policy. The prime minister has not deigned it fit to explain to the people as to what strategic gains accrue to India by going out of the way to appease our hostile neighbour. With an adversarial Pakistan, whose political governance and foreign policy is dictated by the India-hostile fixation and military adventurism of the Pakistan Army, India’s Pakistan policy leaves no scope or space for political idealism. For decades after 1947, India has withstood external coercion on Kashmir and Pakistan even when it was comparatively more vulnerable strategically, militarily and economically. Now that it is an emerging economic power and has acquired a greater clout in the changing global scenario, there is no justifiable reason for Manmohan Singh to succumb to external pressure and imperil India’s national interest.

In view of the prevailing dynamics in Pakistan, India’s policy toward it has to be based on Pakistan Army’s attitudinal reflexes, compulsive neurotic hostility to India and its relentless pursuit of the asymmetrical warfare of proxy war, terrorism attacks and fomenting insurgencies within India. Our policy mechanisms and perspectives have to take into account that these factors will prevail for years to come till a truly democratic is established in Pakistan or till India takes decisive action to destroy its military establishment’s imperial pretensions. Till such a situation is created, blind pursuit of peace initiatives will only embolden Pakistan’s military adventurism and dilute India’s strategic leverages. Bowing to external pressures, or vain ambitions to be seen as prophets of peace, will only end up in India being looked at as a “soft state”.

Unfortunately, the UPA government’s climbdown from India’s stated positions at Havana, Sharm-el Sheikh, Thimphu and now New Delhi, do not project India’s image as a nation serious about safeguarding its security interests and capable of warding off direct and indirect pressure from Pakistan’s strategic patrons like the US and China. False hopes of the Indian policy establishment on Pakistan’s sincerity have already resulted in grave distortions in India’s national security. Induced by unrealistic hopes of peace with Pakistan, India’s war preparedness has suffered, and glaring voids exist in our military inventories.

India needs to re-calibrate its present Pakistan policies and base them on a format of political and strategic realism, rather than political idealism. Pursuit of an elusive peace may win Manmohan plaudits from his international patrons, but it will leave India in the lurch.
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