Retreating from the brink

And we are back from the brink after an unprecedented clash and counter-clash in the air and on the borders. After the decision to release a captured Indian pilot and a fresh sweep against proscribed terrorist outfits as Modi’s juggernaut backfires, the Subcontinent is back to an uneasy ‘normal’: India going into self-consuming electoral divisiveness and Pakistan back to its unfinished business of clearing the terrorist problem.

We are back on the trail of the fateful Kartarpur Corridor with our DGMOs supposed to be resuming monitoring of the ceasefire agreement of 2013, resumption of diplomatic discourse and return of respective high commissioners back to their diplomatic posts. After crossing the Rubicon and trying a conventional warfare tactic, the Subcontinent is out of the imminent zone of active conflict. But another provocative act could throw a spanner into the fragile works of de-escalation.

We are told that the decision to repeat the ban on the Jamaat-ud-Dawah (LeT) and Falah-e-Insaniyat Foundation was taken in January this year and it was made public after Prime Minister Imran Khan raised the issue in the NSC meeting on February 21. Pakistan’s interior ministry has now belatedly taken action on banning 70 proscribed outfits, including Jaish-e-Mohammed. It seems that Pakistan will not be taking the embarrassment of having to be seen as defending JeM chief Masood Azhar from being declared an internationally proclaimed terrorist by the UN Security Council this time in its upcoming meeting. Some kind of rapprochement seems to have taken place, perhaps, on the January 2004 understanding against “cross-border terrorism”.

This is not the first time that such pronouncements have been made but the menace continued to re-emerge with new facades. The continuing Indo-Pak animosity also continued to blur the necessity to take on many terrorist outfits. There wasn’t much of a plan to realise the objectives of previous half-baked banning efforts. Mainstreaming them into electoral politics badly backfired. Allowing them to undertake relief work resulted in expanding their support bases and areas of recruitments. Integrating them into paramilitary forces could also make things much worse. No heart-transplant could have taken place without a rigorous process of ideological transformation and reforms within madressahs and a reversal of the jihadi narrative. It takes generations to change such mindsets.

When, in the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorist attack, the then president Zardari tried to tackle a very dangerous standoff, his efforts were badly obstructed and he had to face the music of Memogate on his positive overtures to India. Similarly, when former prime minister Nawaz Sharif tried to handle the Pathankot incident, he too had to face the same kind of over-blown reaction.

The message then was loud and clear: security and international relations were not civilian business. Fortunately, things have now remarkably changed for the better. Prime Minister Imran Khan is seen to be supported by all institutions and has emerged as a leader who is ready to go an extra mile for peace in the region. As opposed to Prime Minister Modi’s bellicosity, his peace overtures won many in India and the world to his sincere efforts.

It is wrongly being believed in India that Pakistan went on a back foot because of international pressure. No doubt the world community joined the Indian chorus over the Pulwama attack. But India lost diplomatic support with Imran Khan’s disarming tactics amid heightened worries about the conflict spiralling into a nuclear standoff. At this point, Pakistan was also not otherwise facing international isolation due to its productive engagement with the Americans to bring the Afghan Taliban to the negotiating table. Conversely, the international community’s intervention to de-escalate tensions served the purpose of Pakistan’s restraint. If aggravation of conflict served the hawkish Modi regime and war-mongering Indian media, pacifism suited the tactical purpose of an otherwise ‘warrior state’ and a docile Pakistani media mimicking the official line behind a facade of dovishness.

A strange electoral polarisation is emerging in India on grounds of the pro-national and anti-national divide that is being propounded by Modi and his hard-line Hindutva. Modi is now fully into his electoral campaign with doubtful military gains, disputed by the opposition, and taking refuge behind the solemnity of the ambiguous pronouncements of Indian armed forces. He is combining anti-Pakistan rhetoric with the failure of his predecessors to have built formidable defence forces while also blaming the opposition for subscribing to the Pakistani narrative about the abortive nature of the Indian air attacks. The opposition, on the other side, is accusing the Modi government of using the military standoff and suspected military gains for his election campaign.

But the sorry side of this electoral divide is that no party is focusing on what kind of relations India should be evolving with Pakistan and what is going to be its policy on Kashmir and whether it will be different from the current militaristic repression of the Kashmiri upsurge. There is also a dangerous trend of the term “nuclear blackmail”. The nuclear threat is real and must not be underestimated, nor should the threshold be lowered. The first thing India and Pakistan must do is come up with policy about the management of the nuclear threshold and define clear redlines and taking additional safety measures regarding their command and control systems.

It’s time for Pakistan to take decisive measures to take action against terrorist elements that could use Pakistani territory; this is only in Pakistan’s own national interests. India too should focus on those elements within that are helping proxy wars.

A sovereign country can neither allow a handful of terrorists take the nation and the region hostage nor allow others to do what in our own right. Pakistan has suffered too much at the hands of terrorism. Due to domestic terrorism, no one bought Pakistan’s narrative over the violations of human rights in Kashmir.

The Kashmiris’ struggle has reached a point of total revolt as the Indian military repression has lost its kinetic limitations. Let thisdemocratic struggle not be defamed by proscribed terrorist outfits.

Pakistan should come up with a series of confidence-building measures and proposals for peace in the Subcontinent before the Indian elections, so that Indian politicians too are forced to come up with alternative proposals during their election campaign. It’s time for loud and far-sighted rethinking, and it should not be wasted in point-scoring.

The writer is a senior journalist.

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