By K. Shankar Bajpai on post-Kargil pressures appeared in "The Hindustan Times" on July 26, 1999

Of the many lessons Kargil has for us, three demand immediate attention. To imagine we all know Pakistan can be fatal, a serious study of its capabilities and intentions is essential for deciding how to deal with it, some international involvement is inescapable, even useful, and we must learn to handle it; and, perhaps most importantly, our state’s discharge of responsibilities must be rescued from the degeneration evidently spreading from everyday life to our security arrangements.

It always takes a crisis to stimulate our capabilities. This time national consciousness has been impressively aroused, enough, perhaps, for the leadership to attempt the root and branch reforms beyond us in normal times. Electoral considerations will, sadly, come in the way, but there is no avoiding ultimate compliance with these three lessons; the sooner we start, the better. First, we too must be a determinant of the terms for Indo-Pakistani relations, as distinct from reacting to Pakistani initiatives as we have done for fifty years. For this we must be clear about Pakistan’s attitudes and ambitions.

Dedication to Kashmiri rights sounds noble, but hardly believable. Sheer desire for possession, religious fervour, post-partition frustrations, army arrogance and revanchism — all fuel their all-consuming obsession, but underlying it all is the burning longing to get the better of India at all costs. It is a mistake just to blame their military, which actually includes some of their most sensible thinkers, and which has been no worse than many Pakistani politicians. But these two, plus the mullahs and the Punjabi feudal hierarchy, provide the unrelenting core which consistently undermines all detente possibilities. Anti-Indianism is inherent in this power structure, which only the Pakistani people can change.

India had done nothing adverse to Pakistan, Lahore had laid out the route towards detente, with improved atmospherics on both side, and finally normalcy was resurfacing in Kashmir. The biggest confrontation since 1971 was totally uncalled for. We have repeatedly agreed to discuss Kashmir on the understanding that they would help defuse the issue, only to find Pakistan using such agreements to wriggle out of difficulties and then revert to mischief.

Furthermore, history shows that the Punjabi Mussalmaan dominating Pakistan only accepts superior strength when it is demonstrably too much for him. If no Pakistani leader feels he can survive giving up on Kashmir, he must know no Indian can survive giving in on it, so what did they think they could achieve by their intrusion — or, now, by insisting on immediate talks? Even Pakistan cannot expect us to surrender to shot-gun negotiations. Clearly, they must work with us to change circumstances, so that solutions beyond anybody’s capabilities today become conceivable.

Meanwhile, what to expect from Pakistan? More of the same, surely. Its Kargil adventure was simply a continuation of its decade-old policy with added means. The “brilliant” gambit of seizing the heights would balance Siachen, expose the Leh road, revive the flagging militancy and, of course, “internationalise” Kashmir. Whether it could have worked at all against greater alertness is a gathering controversy, but that it did not work out as intended suggests the misjudgment that India would react less strongly and the world more sympathetically. However, any impression that Pakistan’s mistake will chasten and change it is wholly illusory.

The misjudgment explanation adds another difficulty — by giving Pakistan the probably unintended benefit of making a virtue of recklessness. Insofar as Indo-Pakistani tensions result from Pakistan’s sincere, not fabricated, fears of India, dual nuclearisation, enhancing Pakistan’s security by neutralising India’s conventional superiority, should be stabilising. Many of us resented Western projections of heightened dangers as Caucasian condescension, as though Indians and Pakistanis could not fit the US-Soviet paradigm. Kargil certainly shakes such confidence; is rogue nuking unthinkable? It costs Pakistan little to make India pay extensively. Until something changes radically in Pakistan and/or approach to India, we can only plan on the basis of what Pakistan has told us endlessly; no detente without Kashmir. This effectively means, no detente. The world is not inclined to accept that, so our other priority is to embark on selling our view to the world.

That, alas, is not our way. Offensive to our righteousness, the very idea is alien to our isolationist nature. We neither like interacting with outsiders nor — dare it be said? — care to know how. It is highly instructive to study why Mountbatten thought we handled Kashmir’s initial internationalisation “abominably”; then, too, Pakistan projected its pretensions to virtue and distortions of fact so effectively, in contrast to our frequently “inexplicable silence”, to quote historian Sisir Gupta, that lasting impressions still work against us, notably that we are inimical to Pakistan and, most harmfully, that our retention of Kashmir is based on repression.

These twin international impressions make extremely difficult the persuasion effort we must now undertake. Others will adopt positions for various reasons of their own, but India must persist in trying to shape their decisions. This requires, first, an end to our futile debate about “internationalisation”. Of course we will not accept third party determination of what we and Pakistan should decide, or how, but it is sheer self-inflicted blindness to imagine some international involvement can be avoided. Apart from risk of war between two nuclear capables inevitably attracting international activity, power will exercise itself.

Braving posturing against hegemonism, power politics, selective interventionism, double standards et al, cannot help us recast the world, we must adapt to its ways. We have sat through pressures before; we would serve our interests better by trying, at least as best we can, to affect them. (It would help to act upon, not just parrot, the truism that interests determine policy. Broadening the range of interaction with selected countries, most obviously economically, will gain us more support than all our claims to being more decent than our neighbour). Understanding, if not support, has to be sought for two unpalatable positions: Kashmir cannot be discussed with Pakistan until cooperative relations have grown; and India must speedily update its military capabilities.

That we were, in crisis, able to manage despite our handicaps, must not lull us into misjudging what we must do next. Nothing will safeguard our interests more enduringly than sorting out our relations with the Valley; if that is too difficult in isolation, let it be part of our long overdue general dialogue on centre-state relations, but it must start urgently. But the route to Indo-Pakistan normalcy does not lie through Kashmir, which can only be an end-subject.

A former Pakistani Premier has pointed this out. Her public regret at “holding India-Pakistan relations hostage to the single issue of Kashmir” will cost Benazir Bhutto heavily in Pakistan, without adding much to her credibility in India, but her proposal to develop across-the-board trade and other relations before tackling Kashmir is the only practicable course. The world should listen to her if not to us, but it is we who must sell this line.