President Asif Ali Zardari flew to India at a time the relationship had some of its lights flickering and a wind, albeit weak, in its sail, evident from the tuning down of shrill rhetoric over the last two years and progress in trade relations. The ostensible purpose of Zardari’s visit was to pay respects at the mausoleum of Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti at Ajmer, prompting a few to see immense symbolical significance in his decision. Sufism is perceived to represent a more humane version of Islam, extolled as much for propagating equality as it is for its flexibility and eclecticism. It was consequently asked: wasn’t the Pakistani President through his visit to India underscoring his ideological opposition to militant Islam? To those who throng dargahs, such profound questions are irrelevant, for their motivation for undertaking pilgrimage is often temporal. No wonder, the attempt to perceive Zardari’s trip beyond the apparent — a thanksgiving for the fulfilment of mannat his wife had asked at the Ajmer shrine on her visit here in 2005 — had a wit quip, “Jo paata hai woh jaata hai” (Those who receive are those who visit).
Ironically, in the days preceding Zardari’s arrival in Delhi, we Indians could have been forgiven for believing that Pakistan was still in thrall to militant Islam. This perception gained ground because of the US’s injudiciously timed decision to announce a whopping $10 million bounty on Jamaat-ud-Dawa ameer Hafiz Saeed, thereby rekindling the blood-soaked memory of the terror attacks on Mumbai on November 26, 2008. Saeed had been accused of masterminding the assault on Mumbai, presumably at the behest of the jihadi rogue elements in the ISI. This view gained credence as Saeed was set free after a brief spell of incarceration.
With him billed as India’s Osama, Washington’s decision to announce a bounty on Saeed stoked hopes that perhaps he could now be brought to justice. But such optimism soon segued into disappointment as the irrepressible Saeed thumbed his nose at the Americans and Indians and issued defiant statements. Indians looked askance at Islamabad as it too harped on the necessity of securing prosecutable evidence to arraign Saeed in court. This seemed a lame excuse to most Indians who are accustomed to South Asian states, including their own, routinely violating due process.
Most Indian newspapers devoted pages on trying to fathom Saeed’s pathological hatred for India, and detailing the role of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba in several terror attacks in India. Even before April 8, to defuse public pressure, Indian officials declared that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would indeed discuss Saeed with his Pakistani guest. The issue of terrorism — and therefore Kashmir — returned to the top of the agenda of a visit self-avowedly portrayed as a tryst with Sufism.
It took nature’s cruelty to remind us about the absurdity of certain issues dogging Indo-Pak relations. A day before Zardari arrived in India, a massive avalanche buried 124 Pakistani soldiers and 11 civilians deployed on the Siachen glacier. This tragedy could as well have befallen India. The 135 deaths are indeed a severe indictment of Indian and Pakistani leaders who have been unable to demilitarise Siachen and remain eyeball-to-eyeball on the frozen desert.
In his meeting with the Indian Prime Minister, Zardari reportedly expressed his willingness to emulate the ‘China model’ in his conduct of foreign policy towards India. The eponymous paradigm refers to the stance India and China adopted towards each other at the turn of this century — keeping aside their differences over the border issue, and despite periodically sniping at each other, the two countries resolved to improve trade relations, and coordinate their activities on international issues pertinent to them. Indo-China trade registered an astonishing growth, rising to over $70 billion from less than $1 billion in 2011.
But then, the nature of relationship between India and China is remarkably different from India-Pakistan. Unlike China, India and Pakistan were once one entity; unprecedented bloodshed accompanied their separation. In contrast, the emergence of People’s Republic of China had the Indian leaders raising toast, and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru publicly hoped its liberation would set an example for other countries then still groaning under the colonial yoke. And though animosity seeped into the relationship because of the Indo-China conflict of 1962, history was not provided an overhang as the Chinese returned the Indian territory they had so swiftly occupied.
The overhang of history indeed poses gargantuan problems for India and Pakistan. You can grasp this from comparing India’s stance on Tibet, as against Pakistan’s on Kashmir. India considers Tibet as an inalienable part of China. India neither supported the Tibetan uprising before the 2008 Olympics, nor did it criticise Beijing for brutally crushing it. In fact, Delhi took stringent security measures to ensure Tibetans did not disrupt the ceremony surrounding the Olympic torch relay in Delhi, as it had happened, for instance, in Australia. Even the 30 self-immolations in China over the last few months have not elicited a response from the Indian foreign office.
Will Zardari or political rivals remain silent should such types of protest rock Kashmir? Let us face it: Tibet is neither an emotional nor an electoral issue in India. It does not agitate most Indians. In contrast, Kashmir touches the heart of people in the subcontinent; it is a perennial card in the hands of the politician.
A German cultural institute had once held an essay competition on “How to liberate the present from the past and the future from the present”. Without wrestling with the sinister shadows of history, Indian and Pakistani leaders cannot usher in everlasting peace, until we redefine the word to mean a quieter border, and long periods of darkness interspersed with days of light.
The author is a Delhi-based journalist