Flip Flop Pakistan Policy

The Indian foreign policy is still sounding amateurish on Pakistan. Either it should be hawkish or peaceful. It should not swing from one end to the other frequently. As far as the hawkish stand is concerned time has proved that it is disaster. Peace takes times and it inflicts severe damage to the nation. If we are willing to accept the ahimsa method then all the troubles need to be accepted for the long term gains. The recent meet of Dr. Manmohan and Asif Ali Zardari is another flip flop posture of India.

Kanwal Sibal writes in The Times of India (17 June 2009)

The newly elected UPA government announced, through the presidential address, an ambitious domestic agenda of action. But the external affairs
agenda lacked new content. The treatment of foreign affairs was perfunctory even as the situation around us is becoming more challenging. The government intends to improve relations with all our neighbours, the major powers as well as Africa and Latin America. Our watchwords will be the pursuit of enlightened self-interest and maintaining the independence of our foreign policy. All this is unexceptionable, but platitudinous.

The message to Pakistan was conciliatory. We are willing to ''reshape'' our policy towards it if it sincerely confronts terrorism on its soil directed against us. The phraseology used suggests that we retain hope that Pakistan can address the issue of terrorism to our satisfaction. Why this will be so when Pakistan continues to evade responsibility for properly investigating the Mumbai massacre and punishing all those involved is not clear. The resumption of the India-Pakistan dialogue, which the Americans favour, has hinged on this action by Pakistan, but its establishment continues to deflect pressure with its devious tactics of partial action, double-dealing and exploitation of international anxieties about its internal situation, not to mention leveraging to its advantage US compulsions in Afghanistan.

What exactly reshaping our policy means if Pakistan acts against terror is unclear, but it implies our readiness to go beyond simply recommencing the suspended dialogue. Reshaping would suggest changing the contours of our policy perceptibly. How our policy could look different from the one pursued by the previous UPA government with its backchannel gains and out-of-the-box thinking is unclear. Frankly, it is Pakistan, not India, which has prevented the normalisation of bilateral relations by making it contingent on the resolution of the Kashmir issue. It is Pakistan, therefore, that needs to reshape its policy towards India, not vice versa.

Some confusion has surfaced early at the policymaking level on the issue of resumption of dialogue with Pakistan. At one level, the government may reason that as neither the spate of terrorist attacks on our cities culminating with the Mumbai mayhem nor the opposition's campaign that the UPA was weak on terror for vote-bank reasons had affected its electoral support, its handsome poll success gives it political cover to pick up the threads of dialogue with Pakistan. At another, having specified some minimum conditions before the dialogue could restart, it would fear inviting commotion in Parliament if, without an adequate Pakistani response, it ceded unilaterally.

This explains why one day the press was told unofficially that India would find it difficult to insist, in the face of pressure from other countries, that we would talk only if our two conditions are fulfilled, and the next day the intention not to resume dialogue was reaffirmed officially. 'Sources' have also told the press that it would be better, in anticipation of US pressure during secretary of state Hillary Clinton's visit in July, to restart the dialogue with Pakistan as it would then appear that the step was a result of our own volition rather than America's. The point has also been made that re-engaging Pakistan might reduce the danger of another, widely anticipated Mumbai-like attack. These seem to be exercises to prepare the ground for change of policy.

Surprisingly, our anxiousness to begin talking to Pakistan again was indicated after Hafiz Saeed's release and Pakistani prime minister Yusuf Raza Gilani's unrefuted offensive restatement of Pakistan's traditional Kashmir policy. The timing could not have been less appropriate. Such signals on our part only feed Pakistani intransigence, raise doubts about the firmness of our position in the minds of those whose support we seek to persuade Pakistan to act on Mumbai, and indeed invite pressure on us to move in the direction we have in mind.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's statement in Parliament on June 9 did not remove the confusion entirely. The call to Pakistan to take ''strong, effective and sustained'' action to prevent terrorist attacks on India is right, but it has the tonality of an appeal and not a precondition. That it is in India's ''vital interest'' to ''try again to make peace'' with Pakistan suggests that there is a desire to put behind us the Mumbai episode and Pakistan's conduct thereafter. If there were signs of Pakistan changing course, affirming this would be appropriate, but do we have evidence of this? Our willingness to meet Pakistan ''more than halfway'' if it pursues the path of peace offers an incentive that may be interpreted by it as anguish at not being able to cope with the challenge posed to us.

One can understand the larger international scenario in which these statements are being made. In that context we would come across as sober and responsible. But past experience shows that Pakistan would construe our reasonableness as weakness, and those who would applaud our moderation would not stand by us when needed. The bane of our Pakistan policy has been our inability to stay the course whichever the party in power. In time, we begin to see our reasonable position as undue rigidity and, disregarding the lessons of the past, we are ready to commit the same mistakes again.

It is wise to engage the Pakistan government and finish off the terrorists. Bhutan in the past and Bangla Desh are good examples. Without allowing emotions to take control, it should be done.