A lot has happened in the last few weeks in the world, and I have to respond to a few of the comments on my last couple of posts..so here goes...
The Indo-Pak Bus Route and the Musharraf Visit
The Telegraph has this very informative piece called "Without Getting Gooey: India-Pakistan peace efforts are back to Vajpayee's initiative":
On a more alarming note:The national security adviser, M.K. Narayanan, also nearly wrecked the summit, more or less on the same lines that L.K. Advani is accused of having wrecked the Agra summit in 2001. Narayanan’s uncompromising insistence on a reference to terrorism in Monday’s joint communiqué on Musharraf’s talks with Indian leaders meant, for some tense hours on Sunday, that there would be no joint communiqué. It would have cast a long shadow on the General’s visit to New Delhi — which the world now assumes will be a turning point in south Asia’s history. But Narayanan, typically for a man who has spent his entire professional life as a spook, refused to budge.
Before Manmohan Singh had his first meeting in New York with Musharraf, Narayanan’s predecessor, J.N. Dixit, and his Pakistani counterpart, Tariq Aziz, had agreed during one of their four secret meetings that a reiteration of this commitment would be implicit in the September 24 joint statement. Dixit’s attitude made common sense: why rub Musharraf’s face in the dirt, when the objectives of such an action can be achieved without doing so. Thus, it was agreed during the preparatory stages of the September joint communiqué that the two sides would merely refer to Musharraf’s January commitment without spelling out what he said.In New Delhi, during the last weekend, Pakistani officials tried to sweet-talk their Indian counterparts into dropping any reference to the January document. They argued that the two sides, after all, were making progress on Kashmir: why bring up the distasteful matter of terrorism and spoil the atmosphere? This argument found many takers on the Indian side. The Pakistanis were counting on Dixit’s absence in New Delhi, but Narayanan proved to be an equal match for the Pakistanis as the new national security adviser.
So, it is back to square one?The New Delhi summit took place especially at a time when Narayanan did not have to be reminded, if at all, about Pakistan’s continuing potential for cross-border terrorism. Only a few weeks ago, preparatory to the visit of the American secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, he had comprehensively reviewed details of terrorist training camps that still operate inside Pakistan. According to Indian intelligence officials in New Delhi who have gathered intricate details — including photographs — of those camps recently, 52 of those continue to be run inside Pakistan.
But maybe there is still hope...For Musharraf, it is a supreme irony that as a result of his meeting with Singh, he has taken India-Pakistan peace efforts exactly back to where Atal Bihari Vajpayee started a bold peace initiative with his then counterpart across the border, Nawaz Sharif. The man who wrecked that initiative was none other than Musharraf. After Vajpayee’s bus journey to Lahore in 1999, the plan was that Pakistan would stop its sponsorship of violence in Jammu and Kashmir. In return, India would scale down its security presence in the state. Six years later, Narayanan last week proposed just that.
The opening of the Indo-Pak bus route has been in the cynosure lately in addition to a lot of hoopla about the dictator's visit too. According to The Acorn,It is an open secret among those who practise diplomacy in New Delhi that Singh’s cabinet colleagues who deal with foreign policy tried to sabotage his summit with Musharraf more than once, not by opposing it openly, but by their inaction. It is to the credit of the prime minister and a tribute to his ability to cut through bureaucratic and systemic impediments that he managed to pull off the meeting with Musharraf with a reasonable degree of success.
He did this by using a back channel: S.K. Lambah, his special envoy on Pakistan, a veteran in dealing with Islamabad during his long years as an Indian diplomat. The lesson to be drawn from this experience is that if solutions are to be found to disputes between India and Pakistan, the spadework has to be done through back channels and not through normal diplomatic activity. And that spadework has to be vetted and approved by someone like Narayanan, who, because of his training and instinct, will approach anything done with Pakistan with suspicion and premonitions of a conspiracy.
In an interesting turn of events, a Kashmiri woman, who came back after 56 years in the first historic Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus from the other side of Kashmir on April 7, has approached the State Government for restoration of her ancestral property.India must respect property rights. But in this case, there is the basic question of whether a Pakistani citizen can own land and immovable property in India. Foreigners generally cannot own land in India. It is ominous that the very first bus, that was launched to allow Kashmiris from ‘either side of the LoC’ to meet their relatives has thrown up this controversial passenger. The Pakistani authorities have been very careful in their ’screening process’ indeed.
Under India’s constitution, the state of Jammu & Kashmir is accorded a special status — one of the terms of which is that unless they are residents of the state, Indian citizens cannot own land in Kashmir. If the Pakistani passenger’s claim is successful, it will be an irony that what it denies to its own citizens, India is prepared to offer to Pakistani ones.
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