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A shadow on the peace process

Nirupama Subramanian

The exchange of words between India and Pakistan after the Mumbai attacks shows the trust deficit.

INVESTIGATORS PROBING the Mumbai blasts are yet to pin the blame for the attacks decisively on any group, but 7/11 has already cast a shadow on the India-Pakistan peace process. Pakistan Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri found himself at the receiving end of a sharp protest from India for the implication in a statement by him that the terrorist attacks underlined the need to make progress in the peace process. The strongly worded statement from India — perhaps the strongest since the peace process began — elicited a defensive response from Pakistan that his remarks had been "misreported."

The Foreign Secretaries were scheduled to meet on July 20-21 to take stock of the just-ended third round of the composite dialogue process, and to fix a calendar for the fourth round. If the talks are held, it is expected that after the Mumbai attacks, the issue of terrorism cannot but take centre stage. Although there appears to be an agreement to hold the fourth round (the statement issued at the end of the Secretary-level Wullar/Tulbul talks mentioned that discussions would continue in the next round), Tuesday's attacks in Srinagar and Mumbai are bound to lower expectations on both sides.

But on both sides, expectations from the peace process were not high even before 7/11. One reason perhaps is the differences in the expectations themselves. Pakistan expected a quick deal on Kashmir, or at least on one of the other contentious issues; for India, the process is a means to ending "cross-border" militancy and terrorism.

In Pakistan, ever since the Siachen talks failed to produce the expected breakthrough, the political leadership, from President Pervez Musharraf downward, has been expressing disappointment at the slow pace of the peace process, and the fact that it has not been "result-oriented."

Along with this was Mr. Kasuri's own complaint that there was no Minister for External Affairs with whom he could speak directly. The Pakistani press said bureaucrats and diplomats were smothering the peace process and that political contact was needed to inject life into it. Commentators complained that a visit by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh could have brought back some life into the process, but that did not happen. There is also disappointment that while Pakistan had significantly diluted its stand on Kashmir — President Pervez Musharraf's "out-of-the-box" proposals are cited as evidence — India has shown no similar spirit, and has been downright unresponsive to the proposals.

Gloom-and-doom atmosphere

The suspicion has grown that India is stringing Pakistan along, and that the confidence-building measures and people-to-people contacts have become an end in themselves, and are not, as Pakistan believed, steps towards resolving the "core" issue of Kashmir. This is "conflict-management and not conflict resolution," a former diplomat wrote in The Nation. Adding to the gloom-and-doom atmosphere is the grievance that even where a breakthrough seemed at hand, the process failed to produce an agreement, as for instance on Siachen.

Even staunch supporters of the confidence building measures such as Talat Masood, a retired army general who now heads Pugwash in Pakistan, have expressed disappointment that "as far as substantive issues are concerned, we are where we started."

No one has gone as far as to spell out what the alternatives might be, but several analysts have sounded warnings that President Musharraf is India's best chance of finding peace in the region, but that time is running out. They say India is paradoxically assisting in this process by denying him any results from the peace process.

But if Pakistan has found the process yielding diminishing returns, New Delhi too has found it difficult to deal with a leadership that is quite evidently not able to match its words with deeds, even in its commitments to the U.S. Can India succeed where a superpower has failed, the argument goes.

It is not just the Indian establishment that has this perception. In the Mumbai blasts, Indian officialdom has been very guarded in its reaction. But the readiness of the Indian media to believe the Pakistan hand in the Mumbai blasts reflects the fact that Islamabad has not yet been able to convince Indian civil society that it can rein in extremists.The Opposition Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, a coalition of six religious parties that endorsed President Musharraf's controversial election-by-referendum in 2002, is angry with him for his pro-U.S. policies — for participating in the "war on terror" in Afghanistan, and for taking steps to curtail Kashmiri militant groups.

The Government has responded by soothing the MMA's ruffled feathers. The monthly Herald reported, as have several other news publications, that in the North-West Frontier Province, where the MMA controls the provincial government, the Government has done little to prevent a wave of Islamist extremism from spreading through the province. Ditto in Waziristan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where Pakistan said it had deployed 10,000 additional troops to the 80,000 already in place in order to strengthen itself in the U.S. led war on terror, but has begun talks with the militants, variously described in newspaper reports as Taliban, religious fundamentalists or militants, and by the government as "miscreants."

The concern is that problems will increase as elections approach and President Musharraf walks the thin line between keeping both the U.S. happy and the religious groups at home satisfied.

The exchange of words between the two sides after the Mumbai attacks, even before India has raised a finger in the direction of Pakistan shows the trust deficit between the two establishments even after three rounds of the composite dialogue process.

There have been net gains from the peace process for both sides: the ceasefire on the LoC is certainly one, and the expanded people-to-people contacts are another. These have built a strong constituency for peace in both India and Pakistan.

The back channel contacts still appear strong. These are the small silver linings that will not allow the peace process to die easily, despite dire pronouncements about its health. Even the most trenchant critics of the peace process and its confidence-building measures cannot deny this.

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