A Time for Hope in South Asia

By Edward Thomas Pinch

South Asia watchers are now asking whether the benign virus that has been fostering accommodation between the US and the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union and China, China and India—perhaps even between the PLO and Israel—will spread to relations between India and Pakistan. We can only hope so, and what are Pew years for, if not for hope?

The three agreements initialed by Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi at the fourth annual summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation in Islamabad this past December hint at a promise of more to come. The most significant of the accords is aimed at preventing the two sides from attacking each other's nuclear installations. The other agreements treat the more mundane, yet important, areas of taxation and cultural exchange. Perhaps equally significant is that Gandhi's visit to Pakistan just before the new year was the first by an Indian head of government since his grandfather, Jawhahrlal Nehru, went there in 1960.

Neither these agreements, nor the conciliatory statements made by the two leaders at the regional summit, are expected to excise the problems that three Indian-Pakistani wars have failed to put to rest. But circumstances are now more propitious for an accommodation of differences than they have been since the two nations were carved out of the British raj more than 40 years ago in a spasm of communal violence that capped a millennium of Hindu-Muslim rivalry.

Factors Favor Accommodation

For the first time, both countries are headed by young leaders born after that trauma. And, though unequal to India in many respects, Pakistan can take justifiable pride in being able to meet its neighbor on an equal moral footing, with a new democratically-elected prime minister, Pakistan's first in over a decade. It is a national asset that Bhutto's domestic adversaries would be wise not to put at risk.

Pakistan has also closed the gap with India in another way. It has achieved near parity in nuclear weapons capability. Had neither country headed down this costly and dangerous path it would have served the interests of global as well as regional peace. These interests can still be served if India accepts Pakistan's offer to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

As conflicts and confrontations wind down elsewhere in the world, it becomes easier for the young leaders of India and Pakistan to move toward a negotiated settlement of their differences. The fundamental failure of Soviet communism that led to perestroika at home and improved relations with the US is also forcing the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. The US, in turn, faced with a runaway deficit, welcomes and encourages these changes. To balance things in the East, the Soviets are seeking improved relations with China. Mutual exhaustion has led Iran and Iraq to the negotiating table. Even some Israelis and Palestinians seem ready to begin the long journey toward peace. As so many implacable foes begin to think the unthinkable, India and Pakistan may be encouraged to do likewise.

Peace in the Persian Gulf and, when it comes, Afghanistan, will be a welcome reward for Pakistan, as well as a vindication of policies with which Bhutto has readily associated herself. At the same time, peace in the region will require Pakistan to make some readjustments. With the Soviets out of Afghanistan, Pakistan will lose some of its front-line status. It will also be in competition with Afghanistan for economic aid as that country begins the enormous task of reconstruction. And, as the Bush administration and Congress struggle to reduce the US deficit, economic and military assistance will come under ever closer scrutiny. In short, there are economic as well as political incentives for Pakistan to mend its relations with India.

Despite the assets, opportunities, and incentives cited above, Prime Minister Bhutto is in a less than ideal position to deal with India, for her political base at home is not secure. Her Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and its political allies have a majority in the national legislature, but the PPP won control of only one of Pakistan's four provincial governments. If foreign aid diminishes, she will be hard-pressed to sustain the economic growth of the Zia decade, although her shift away from the ineffective, leftist populism of her father toward a centrist, market economy will help. She was not the favored candidate of the Pakistani military, and any effort to make major cuts in that sector would be risky. Meanwhile, a largely fundamentalist opposition is already looking for ways to embarrass her.

Prime Minister Gandhi is not as beset by difficulties as his Pakistani counterpart. India is the leading regional power and democracy there is firmly in place. It is also less dependent on foreign assistance and imports and thus less subject to external pressures. Even so, Gandhi faces problems that will have a bearing on his approach to Pakistan. Unavoidable national elections are set for this year and, for the first time in over a decade, his Congress Party faces a credible opposition in the Janata Dal, recently formed from four well-established parties and headed by V.P. Singh, Gandhi's respected ex-minister of finance and defense.

Opportunity Could Help Gandhi at Home

The Gandhi government has been under severe criticism over breakdowns in public order and for political corruption, most particularly for a major scandal involving a European arms deal. It has also been under attack for its costly and, so far, unsuccessful commitment of troops in Sri Lanka with over 500 killed and 1,500 wounded thus far. Ethnic strife, particularly in the Punjab, has also taken a grisly toll. The prime minister's recent, swift action in sending Indian paratroopers to snuff out an attempted coup in the Maldives, however, has helped redeem some of his credibility.

In the past, political leaders on the subcontinent have turned to saber rattling at real or imagined foreign foes when faced with serious domestic criticism. In the case of India, the threat was held to be Pakistan, China, or both. This option hardly seems open at the moment. Pakistan clearly poses no serious conventional threat to India and is presumably more threatened than threatening in nuclear terms. Its military is still in some disarray following the air crash that killed President Zia and decimated the army's senior ranks. Furthermore, Pakistan has elected a prime minister who has gone out of her way to sound conciliatory. China, in turn, gave Gandhi a cordial reception on his recent visit to Beijing and held out the promise of settlement of the long-standing border dispute that led to the Sino-Indian war of 1962. Indeed, Gandhi initiated the visit not only to defuse a risky border problem, but to help shore up his image at home in preparation for the coming elections. All this suggests that he might also see detente with Pakistan as not only morally correct, but politically wise.

An important objective of such fence mending by Prime Minister Gandhi would be to reduce any temptation on Pakistan's part to aid or abet India's Sikh separatists in the Punjab. Both countries may therefore seize any opportunity to back away from their intermittent armed exchanges on the Siachen Glacier in Kashmir. But detente between India and Pakistan cannot be expected to lead automatically to an early resolution of the 40 year-old Kashmir dispute. Realists on both sides have long admitted privately that acceptance of the UN ceasefire line as the international border is probably inevitable. Although it is still too early for national leaders to say this publicly, accommodation on lesser issues can begin a process to settle this durable dispute sometime in the future. Hope, after all, is what the future is all about.

Edward T. (Tom) Pinch, a retired Foreign Service information officer who completed seven tours of duly in India and Pakistan, is a Berkeley, California based consultant on international affairs, travels frequently to South Asia, and is Bay Area coordinator of the Free Afghanistan Committee.