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insight: Nasty Realism —Ejaz Haider

If and when India and Pakistan go into yet another round of talks, they are likely to talk-talk without really walking the talk. India doesn’t have any incentive to go beyond this and Pakistan will settle for nothing less than something substantive. These are conflicting goals

The meeting between President Asif Ali Zardari and India’s Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg and the decision to let the foreign secretaries meet has rekindled hopes that the two states may resume the dialogue that got stalled after the Mumbai attacks.

Is the hope well placed; even if the dialogue restarts, does talking in and of itself promise results? Let’s consider two push factors.

The United States wants India and Pakistan to start talking and remain engaged. Singh’s decision at the last minute to meet with Zardari had much to do with that pressure. But this is not all. Non-engagement as a policy generally fails to run beyond a point, accumulating more negatives than positives. Even the US has learnt this lesson the hard way vis-à-vis powers much weaker than itself. The India-Pakistan differential is much less and geography makes non-engagement even more difficult and unviable.

Ideally, India would want to kick Pakistan, that being another form of engagement and under propitious conditions for the stronger party more effective than taking a painstaking circuitous approach. But New Delhi can’t do that for reasons that don’t need to be enumerated, being well-known.

Between non-engagement and coercive engagement then is the middle ground: non-violent engagement. It’s called talking. Its intrinsic merit is that it keeps adversaries away from overt, hot conflict. But it may not necessarily lead to any results or prevent one or the other or both from using the strategy of indirect approach to conflict.

It was then a matter of time before India would come round, having been the party to decide to break contact. But whether coming round to talking means any breakthroughs would amount to creating an arbitrary a priori relation between talking and getting results. There is none.

At the end of March this year I was in Bangkok, by the banks of the Chao Phraya River, attending an India-Pakistan CBMs conference. Having been the point-man for the Pakistan side, I was required to open the first session. The night before, at dinner, I was warned by Dr Amitabh Mattoo, former vice chancellor of Jammu University, against being either a Realist or a Deconstructionist, two decidedly opposite and opposed poles. Dr Mattoo wanted me to talk about paradigm shift.

“We need to move forward from here, not look back,” he told me. I was in a quandary. How does one move forward under the circumstances, the necessity of doing so notwithstanding? And on the basis of whose interests, India’s or Pakistan’s. And what if those interests and expectations remain conflicting?

Here’s part of what I penned as talking points.

“Since by Realism I believe Dr Mattoo is referring to neorealism or structural realism, I am at a loss. If I stick to structural constraints there is unlikely to be a paradigm shift. But I cannot be a deconstructionist in the post-structural sense either so where do I go from here.

“Perhaps I have understood finally the state of perplexity that Socrates talked about and which Derrida in one sense referred to as the undecidable — i.e., ‘the experience of that which, though foreign and heterogeneous to the order of the calculable and the rule, must nonetheless deliver itself over to the impossible decision while taking account of what exists’.

“In that sense, Dr Mattoo is spot-on. There are structural constraints and they thwart any movement towards a change. But change we must to survive. I know I am skating dangerously close to constructivism, but trust a good neorealist to say that and still remain one!

“My escape strategy is two-pronged. One is a personal interpretation of neo-realism. I consider realism more than the straitjacket of a theoretical framework. It is a tool that, by emphasising state interests, allows, or should allow, states to be flexible in terms of their approach. The second prong of this strategy is the realisation that neorealism defines anarchy primarily, if not solely, in relation to states because it assumes states to be the only actors on the world stage. That may not be the case anymore. The primary threat...to states today emanates from non-state actors that have the ability to hurt states in multiple ways...

“States therefore need to cooperate in the face of a threat that, in its character, is global, transnational and protean.

“Addressing this threat through cooperative strategies does not mean that inter-state distinctions or rivalries will vanish. They will stay. But the primary threat will, or should, induce states to begin to address those issues through innovative approaches. This includes reviewing, where necessary, the very nature of the social contract that we believe underpins the formation and sustenance of states.

“To invoke Mao Tse-Tung, the nature of the principal contradiction today may not be primarily inter-state; it lies between states and destabilising non-state actors. Five years from the time India and Pakistan embarked on a normalisation process, we gather here to see what can be done, what rescued ‘post-Mumbai’. This fact alone helps me rest my case regarding how vital it is for states to begin to think anew... But equally, it requires that the states change their strategies.

“I...hope that I have been able to avoid the trappings both of realism and deconstruction without sullying my reputation as a realist.”

This was no mere play on words. If realism is indeed looked at as a tool rather than a theoretical framework that allows little room for change, then India and Pakistan can manage to move forward.

But moving forward itself requires a definition. Is it going to be on India’s terms or Pakistan’s or at some meeting ground between the two positions? When Mr Singh says he does not have the mandate to redraw boundaries but can make them irrelevant, what exactly does he mean? We do know now that space was created in the last five years for some innovative solutions. But India baulked. In the second term, would Mr Singh carry those proposals beyond the non-papers stage?

Would India stop fomenting trouble in Balochistan; stop outflanking Pakistan from the west as it is currently doing?

The temptation to do the tactical is always greater because the tactical is tactile, proximate, and offers immediate gains. That has been the story of Pakistan’s follies. Will India take the same route?

Difficult to predict this. Realism has survived all the criticism because while it can be bashed in the classroom, it has a nasty habit of winning on the ground.

When I spoke of the non-state actors in Bangkok, I was alive to the fact that states may find them very useful; and that includes India. If I had conceded it there, that would have rubbished my argument about where the principal contradiction resides today. But one needs to be polite at conferences, especially those focused on CBMs.

Away from the banks of Chao Phraya, the reality is different. If and when the two states go into another round of talks, they are likely to talk-talk without really walking the talk. India doesn’t have any incentive to go beyond that and Pakistan will settle for nothing less than something substantive and result-oriented. These are conflicting goals. In the case of Pakistan and India, even defining “results” can be a tricky exercise.

Ejaz Haider is Consulting Editor of The Friday Times and Op-Ed Editor of Daily Times. He can be reached at sapper@dailytimes.com.pk

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