Mediation is the Message

Mediation is the Message
Achin Vanaik
The Telegraph, 26 July 1999

Now that the Kargil crisis is effectively over it becomes possible to assess its outcomes and to reflect upon its lessons. First, let us not
entertain any illusions. The decisive factor in shaping the manner and speed with which the crisis ended was not India's military successes but US-brokered secret diplomacy. However, this did not remain particularly secret once the visit to India of the former Pakistan High Commissioner to India, Niaz Niak was revealed. And once it became known that regular contacts were being maintained between high officials (up to the prime ministerial and presidential levels) in the US government on one hand, and, on the other, in the Indian and Pakistan governments respectively. To accept this fact is not to disparage India's military successes gained at the cost of the heroic sacrifices of its soldiers but simply to put those successes into proper perspective.

They were made possible because of two things - the sheer scale of India's military response and its willingness to bear severe personnel losses. In both respects, the disproportion in comparison to the military scale of Pakistan's attack (and of its casualties) are very obvious. Even so, had diplomacy not ultimately triumphed, the reclamation of territory lost, while not itself in doubt (as long as Pakistan did not escalate matters seriously) would certainly have been a more prolonged and costly affair. To put it another way, it was not a `turning of the tide' militarily but politically-diplomatically that caused Pakistan to humiliatingly acknowledge and publicly renounce its misadventure. Correspondingly, it is the political not military nature of Islamabad's defeat that is most significant. Militarily, the intrusion succeeding in `bleeding' India and in ensuring that the inhospitable climes of Kargil becomes in the future another Siachen-like situation. Maintaining a permanent vigil will be costly and physically debilitating, more so for India (the more status quo power) than for Pakistan which has much less reason to fear a major incursion on its side.

It may suit all three countries concerned to pretend that the US did not really play the key role but the initial sketch of the final military procedure - sector-wise withdrawal by Pakistan troops organised and overseen by regularised contact and discussion between the Director Generals of Military Operations of the two countries - was revealed in the Indian press just after the Niak visit itself. The decisive role played by the US should therefore temper all assessments regarding the political gains for the Indian government in the wake of the Pakistan withdrawal. It is Pakistan which has suffered a major political defeat. India has obtained a political victory which is, not however, in the same proportion as the extent of Pakistan's loss. The US has come out as the biggest political gainer of all even if it is not clear about what it should do with its increased influence in the region.

Pakistan's claim that it has gained from this misadventure because the Kashmir issue has been internationalised is nothing but an unconvincing face-saver. At the same time the Indian government's claim that the issue has not been internationalised is equally absurd. Kashmir became
unavoidably internationalised in May 1998 when India effectively nuclearised the Kashmir issue. For India to refuse to acknowledge this reality is for it to continue sticking its neck, ostrich-like, in the sand. So Kargil did not internationalise the Kashmir issue, which had happened earlier. But what it did do was to internationalise it in this specific case, in a manner which worked against the interests of Pakistan! The US and most of international opinion came out in support of the Indian position provided it did not itself cross the LOC. Not only was this a severe blow to Islamabad but the international diplomatic process that was launched ultimately forced Pakistan to back down. The Sharif regime, even if it survives, has been seriously discredited domestically to the benefit of its more extremist fundamentalist rivals.

For India, a considerable measure of sobriety is warranted. Although this time, international opinion came out on its side, the now unavoidable internationalisation of the Kashmir issue also means a serious longer term diplomatic defeat for India. New Delhi's historical and traditional posture of insisting that Kashmir must remain confined within a bilateral framework is now effectively dead. More and more of India's so-called strategic thinkers will now have to come around to recognising that it must accept the fact of internationalisation and find ways to intervene in this wider arena to India's perceived benefit instead of pretending that this arena does not exist or can be avoided. Moreover, the US as a key player in this wider arena will pursue its interests, and despite Kargil, these will not always, or even frequently, coincide with India's. In short, it is a new ballgame with new ground rules and the final outcome is more open-ended, problematic and to a greater extent than ever before not subject to India's full control. Exaggerating the significance of India's political victory over Kargil only helps to obscure this reality and leaves the country less prepared for the future.

The most important consequence of this conflict is that India-Pakistan relations have been set back by many years. If on the Pakistan side, fundamentalist forces and voices will gain ground at the expense of saner ones, the same is likely to happen in India. It is one thing to condemn Pakistan for its misadventure and wrongdoing, to demand restoration of the status quo ante along the LOC, and to blame it for serious deterioration in mutual relations. It is another thing altogether to demonise Pakistan, to advocate its complete destruction as a political-territorial entity, and to call on India to use all avenues to bring about such a denouement. But this is precisely what large sections in India, as a result of Kargil, have been doing, led this time, sadly enough not by the acolytes of the Sangh Combine, but by sections of the liberal intelligentsia. Pakistan is now routinely described as a "rogue state" when by all objective and unemotional standards of what this means (persistent violation of international norms of inter-state behaviour) the real rogue state of the last half-century has been the USA! Nor should it be necessary to detail the past hypocrisies, deceits and violations of international norms of the Indian state in its foreign policy behaviour over the last fifty years, except that this might help to put things in perspective. The last thing we need is the kind of ugly, self-righteous, aggressively militaristic and belligerent nationalism that would simultaneously demonise the character of Pakistan and glorify and whitewash that of the Indian state.

There is already enough of this kind of nationalism in both countries and they feed on each other deepening political, cultural and emotional hatreds. Such attitudes worsen nuclear tensions because mutual demonisation strengthens the belief that the other side is more capable of using its nuclear weapons, i.e. reinforces the already irrational dimension of nuclear deterrence thinking. It also promotes the view that the demonised Other `deserves' to suffer the most extreme military punishment including nuclear attack. Finally, Indo-Pakistan hostility comes to be seen as rooted not in identifiable causes like Kashmir, which at least in principle are resolvable, howsoever difficult this might be, but in untenable notions of `ingrained' or `essentialist' or `systemic' incompatibility which then can only be resolved by the effective destruction of what becomes, in effect, the permanent enemy. This plays into the hands of the religious fundamentalists of both sides because both see Islam and Hinduism as the incompatible `essences' that define the two societies respectively. Does political sanity demand that we travel on this road?

Copyright 1999 The Telegraph