As a self-confessed hardliner, I must admit that being a part of the team engaged in Indo-Pak Track 2 dialogue has been very interesting. A lot of good work is going on by a dedicated team of retired military officers from India and Pakistan who have spent the best years of their lives preparing for war against each other. The two-nation team also includes a handful of retired diplomats, who had, whilst in service, tried to score brownie points at international forums.
It must be mentioned here that mutually agreed military confidence building measures (CBMs) have so far worked (including the ceasefire in Kashmir), though CBMs in international waters have failed, with the Pakistan Navy warships routinely carrying out dangerous manoeuvres close to Indian warships while Pakistani aircraft routinely make low passes over Indian warships. An incident at sea, involving loss of life due to collision, can lead to a major Indo-Pak crisis.
While the Track 2 deliberations cannot be revealed, since their primary purpose is to provide inputs for Track 1 talks, media reports indicate a possible visit by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Pakistan by the end of 2012 or early 2013. Mention has been made of Siachen and Sir Creek
disputes being on the agenda.
Recent media reports about Pakistan wanting to reschedule the Track 1 Sir Creek meeting to sometime after the June 2012 Siachen meeting indicates the possibility that the Sir Creek dispute is now being linked by Pakistan to the Siachen dispute.
Frankly, I would be very happy if these two disputes are resolved amicably.
I may add that India needs to give up what is jocularly called “out of box diplomacy” with regard to its western neighbour. It refers to the unilateral, unconditional goodwill gesture made by Indian Prime Ministers who had lived in pre-Partition Pakistan and have nostalgic memories of their childhood years there.
If media reports are to be believed one such Prime Minister disbanded India’s entire intelligence setup in Pakistan (as a unilateral goodwill gesture), resulting in complete loss of intelligence, followed by the Kargil War in 1999 and numerous terror strikes across India. The damage to Indian intelligence will take decades to undo, as building up human intelligence is a time-consuming process. Then we had the Sharm el-Sheikh agreement in 2009, which brought in the fiction of “India’s involvement in Baluchistan”.
Having lived and sailed in the freezing Siberian Fareast and having visited cold places in the Arctic circle, I was frankly not too overawed by the terrain when I made very brief visits to Siachen and Sir Creek though I do salute the men who stand guard there under very difficult conditions.
These two (and other) Indo-Pak contentious issues need to be resolved, not because of difficult terrain or costs but because it will make greater sense for the two countries to work together and improve not only their economies but their national security also.
The two leaders — Dr Singh and Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari — would do a signal service to humanity (and be truly deserving of a Nobel Peace prize) if they can sign an most favoured nation agreement, put territorial disputes on the back burner, “peacefully” demolish Pakistani terror camps, give up Pakistan’s 2011 plan to deploy tactical nuclear weapons and put trade on the front burner. Rich nations generally do not fight against each other.
Though both countries started out at the same time as independent nations, the differences between India and Pakistan have become more and more marked since 1947 despite having common ailments like corruption, massive tax evasion and numerous scams. The differences are writ large on India’s continued growth and march into a new century (due to its hardworking private entrepreneurs) while Pakistan (due to a “martial population” brought up in madrasas) slid into economic collapse and became a victim of self-created terrorist monsters.
Pakistan is caught in a time warp — that of 1947. It needs to emulate India’s land reforms and secular ethos. It also needs to look after its minorities who have dwindled from 15 per cent in 1947 to below two per cent in 2012. Well-known Pakistani human rights activist Asma Jahangir is reported to have remarked that “if Muslims in India constantly crib to have no say and no power, they should come to Pakistan to see the plight of the minority Hindus with their own eyes. They will never complain and learn to live peacefully with their Hindu brethren in India”.
Unfortunately, despite courageous activism by the Pakistani judiciary and the press, there is little palpable change in Pakistan’s foreign policy and strategic posture. The gloves may be off once the US withdraws from Afghanistan in 2014. Pakistan is, perhaps, realising that the era of getting foreign aid because of its geo-strategic location is over. The Americans have managed to maintain their logistics supply to troops in Afghanistan, despite the Pakistani ban on use of its soil since November 2011, but may require Pakistani land and sea route to remove their heavy equipment post 2014, and also Pakistani non-interference in Afghanistan.
India for its part too needs to improve relations with all its neighbours for some very selfish reasons. It cannot “break out” of South Asia to occupy its rightful place as a global economic power by 2050, by which time Pakistan will, going by the current trends, be a very poor country of 350 million people.
How will the border disputes ever get resolved? Sometime in the distant future, when leaders of a rich India meet the leaders of a rich Pakistan and a rich China, they may discover that between rich nations it’s perhaps easier to find “out of the box” solutions, especially when the people are
educated, well-fed and gainfully employed in activities other than
terror.

The writer, former vice-admiral, retired as Flag Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Eastern Naval Command, Visakhapatnam