Raj Chengappa
Pakistan is like the bounceback toys sold in subcontinental markets. Hit them hard enough and they appear to topple, only to rebound and, if you are not watchful, whack you. As he nears the end of his fourth year as prime minister, Narendra Modi must be both exasperated and frustrated with the way his efforts to deal with Pakistan have turned out. Whatever he has thrown at Pakistan to bring it around, it never seems to learn, and keeps coming back for more punishment.
Rarely has so much hostility been witnessed on the Line of Control (LoC)-where the armies of India and Pakistan stand bunker-to-bunker-since the ceasefire the two sides negotiated in 2003. That agreement now seems as good as dead. Last year, there were an average of three violations a day on the LoC even during winter when conventionally there is less cross-border infiltration because of the thick snow cover. There has been no let-up in the new year. Last week, tensions mounted as terrorists struck the Sunjuwan army camp in Jammu in an attack that saw five army personnel and one civilian killed apart from the three terrorists who carried out the mission. Almost simultaneously, another terror attack on a CRPF camp in Srinagar was foiled, but not before a jawan was killed. India's patience started to wear thin. At a press conference in Jammu, a sombre minister for defence Nirmala Sitharaman charged Pakistan with engineering the Sunjuwan attack and warned: "Pakistan will pay for its misadventure."
The big questions: To what extremes can India go to make Pakistan pay for such 'misadventures'? Does Delhi have a game plan to counter Islamabad's brinkmanship? Is there an endgame?
There are no easy answers. Pakistan believes it has several high-value cards in hand when it sits down to play the game of attrition with India. One of them is its influence in Kashmir and its ability to keep the Valley in a constant state of unrest through its proxies like the Hurriyat. The second ace are the jihadi groups, the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), which the ISI nurtures to initiate cross-border terror attacks at will. The third is Islamabad's efforts to strengthen its all-weather friendship with China and its willingness to behave as a vassal state to Beijing's superpower ambitions. The fourth is Pakistan's relative importance to the US in its quest to find a way out of the Afghanistan mess. The fifth is the all-powerful Pakistani army, the de facto boss, ever willing to brandish its nuke arsenal to warn India against escalating hostilities. And the sixth is the clout Pakistan has of being among the world's largest Muslim nations-and the only one that has the Bomb.
So, has the Modi government been able to trump, even neutralise, any of the aces Pakistan flaunts? Modi is acutely aware that managing relations with Pakistan is the most important foreign policy priority for any Indian prime minister. Since Jawaharlal Nehru, every Indian prime minister has hoped he or she could make Pakistan see the sense of peaceful coexistence with India. As the first BJP prime minister with a clear majority in Parliament, Modi has been no less energetic in his efforts to work out a viable relationship with Pakistan. This, even as he has systematically gone about trying to weaken Pakistan's levers of power, albeit with limited success so far.
To his credit, soon after he took charge, Modi began to play to India's strengths. These included being the world's largest functioning democracy and the globe's fastest growing economy with a secure place at the high table of nations. It was important for Modi to project India as ever willing to extend a hand of friendship to Pakistan while simultaneously pointing a finger at our neighbour and urging major powers to take action against it. Despite his hawkish stance towards Pakistan, Modi surprised the world by inviting his Pakistan counterpart Nawaz Sharif to his swearing-in ceremony along with other SAARC leaders. Soon after, Modi began to change the rules of engagement by cancelling foreign secretary-level talks when Pakistan's high commissioner Abdul Basit tried to involve the Hurriyat in setting the agenda. The message was clear: While willing to resume the dialogue process, there was no place for third-party stakeholders at the negotiating table-it had to be government-to-government, or nothing.
Then, to strengthen his government's hold on Jammu and Kashmir, Modi rammed through a BJP alliance with the PDP to set up a coalition government after the indecisive verdict in the April 2015 assembly polls. Meanwhile, he stormed the global stage projecting India and himself as a power to reckon with and engaging with all the major powers, including the US and China. As importantly, Modi began a major outreach to Muslim nations that Pakistan counted among its friends-Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Oman. And he strengthened India's ties with Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asian countries in Pakistan's backyard. The effort was to diminish Pakistan's ability to play the Muslim card to its benefit.
In 2015, Modi made several sincere efforts to bring Pakistan back to the negotiating table. He sent foreign secretary S. Jaishankar to Islamabad to talk with his counterpart. He then had a cordial meeting with Sharif in the Russian city of Ufa where the two agreed that their National Security Advisors should meet. But then the process suffered setbacks. Pakistan-backed terrorists attacked a bus and struck a police station in Gurdaspur, killing seven people. Then the NSA-level talks in Delhi were called off when Pakistan insisted its NSA would meet the Hurriyat. Modi, however, persevered with Sharif and when the two met on the sidelines of the Paris climate change summit, they agreed their NSAs could meet in a neutral country, Thailand. Modi went further and made an impromptu visit to Lahore on Christmas Day to greet Sharif on his grand-daughter's wedding-repaying Sharif's favour of coming to his swearing-in ceremony.
Pakistan's deep state, disturbed by the turn of events, struck back. Barely a week after Modi's visit, JeM terrorists carried out an audacious attack on the Pathankot air base on January 2, 2016. Indo-Pak relations went downhill thereafter. Meanwhile, the strains in the PDP-BJP alliance began to show and Pakistan upped the ante by stirring widespread unrest in the Valley. After the Burhan Wani killing in July 2016, the Valley experienced some of its darkest days, as Indian security forces struggled to restore law and order. Pakistan's hand was clearly evident.
Modi then began to get tough. In his Independence Day speech, he talked of "the people's cry for freedom" in Pakistan's sensitive Gilgit-Baltistan and Balochistan areas-a performance clearly intended to send the message that Pakistan's vulnerabilities could easily be exploited. When Pakistan-backed terrorists launched another major strike at Uri in September 2016, its army was in for a surprise. Within 10 days of the attack, Modi ordered a daring surgical strike targeting terror launch pads across the LoC. The message to Pakistan: We can play hardball better than you.
To prove it was not dissuaded by the surgical strikes-and emboldened by Chinese support-the Pakistani army began to heat up the LoC. The Indian army, to Pakistan's surprise, began to hit back even harder, and the war of attrition escalated. In Kashmir, Indian security forces gained the upper hand by killing key militants and preventing cross-border infiltration (see accompanying reports). Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump has started getting blunt in his warnings to Pakistan, and Islamabad seems uncertain about how to deal with him. The Pakistani army is under US pressure to make concessions on the Afghan border and, to avoid an internal backlash, is stirring the LoC broth to keep the Kashmiri jihadi groups happy. Also, Pakistan hopes rising tensions with India may tempt Trump into interfering in Kashmir.
So at the end of this bloodletting, what's the scorecard? Experts believe that given that the Kashmir issue remains unsolvable, the endgame is that there really is no endgame. Former NSA Shivshankar Menon believes there is no long-term permanent solution to Pakistan. For him, the question is "how do you manage your relations with it". Others say there's no more a bilateral script as the calculus is now mixed-between India and Pakistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan and the US and Pakistan.
What Modi and his advisors have opened up through their actions is an expanding range of options to manage relations with Pakistan. As an official put it, "If the aperture was one foot wide when we began, we have expanded the scope to one foot on the positive side by going to Lahore and one foot on the negative side by crossing the LoC-so we now have a three-foot aperture to tackle Pakistan. The same guy who was willing to be nice to you was prepared to take the risk and kick your a**." The criticism is that despite all this, Pakistan remains recalcitrant and India's relations are no better-if not worse-than when Modi took charge.
o what next? With Sharif forced to step down in July 2017, the political uncertainty can only be resolved after the general elections due this summer are over. The Pakistani army is clearly unhappy with the Sharif brothers and would prefer to have a weak civilian government, headed possibly by Imran Khan, so it can keep playing puppeteer with the political dispensation. For India, till the elections are over, there is no political leader of stature in Pakistan to engage with to cool down temperatures. As Sharat Sabharwal, former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan, says, "It is a bad time for India to make any big initiatives." There is also concern in some quarters of what experts describe as "the moment of danger"-that the Modi government may want a short battle with Pakistan this fall for political benefit if it finds that its re-election prospects are dimming. But Modi is wise enough to know that just to win an election, it is far too risky a gambit to provoke a war that may spin rapidly out of control.
Experts feel the real card Pakistan has is Kashmir and that India is strengthening it by continuing with its policy of using maximum force to quell the unrest in the Valley. As an expert puts it, "You cannot follow the doctrine of grabbing them by the b***s and expecting their hearts and minds to follow." What India needs to focus on is winning over the Kashmiri people by engaging key stakeholders and being proactive on its development agenda. The Modi government should continue to mount international pressure on Pakistan to dismantle its terror apparatus. Meanwhile, it should step up its intelligence network to prevent terror attacks and strike hard at jihadi leaders and groups on both sides of the border to destroy their ability to do damage. The key remains how India manages its relations with Pakistan with least cost to its development and core interests.
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