With Nawaz’s return to Pak, another peace initiative?

Pakistan’s recently retired army chief Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa’s calculated leak of Indian premier Narendra Modi’s plans to visit Pakistan in April 2021, which was to apparently conclude with a deal to put a 20-year freeze on the Kashmir issue between the two nations, and Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s “let’s talk, three wars are enough” line have not exactly captivated New Delhi, where the doubting Thomases have ratcheted up the ‘no talks unless Pakistan ends terror’ drum. Delhi -- and Islamabad -- driven by domestic compulsions, can ill-afford to be seen as going soft on the other.

Shehbaz’s course correction, “no talks unless statehood is restored to Jammu & Kashmir”, was dictated by deposed rival Imran Khan dissolving provincial assemblies of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, necessitating fresh elections later this year. For the Sharifs’ Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), its Punjab stronghold cannot fall to Imran’s Tehreek-i-Insaaf again. The same goes for the Zardari-Bhutto-led Pakistan People’s Party in Sindh and Balochistan.

Modi, facing nine state polls in the run-up to parliamentary polls in 2024 for a historic third term as PM, shows little inclination to amend the BJP playbook on Pakistan, its convenient whipping boy to drum up votes. Rahul Gandhi’s rubbishing of Digvijay Singh for calling for proof on the Balakot airstrike shows how the Opposition, too, is wary of deviating from the ‘nationalist’ narrative.

But is Modi drawing up a new game-plan? In recent weeks, he has called for an outreach to impoverished Pasmanda Muslims, and issued a fiat against sniping at Bollywood after calls to ban the Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Pathaan. And he is well aware that the BBC documentary on his role in the 2002 Gujarat riots could complicate his international politics.

Was that what Pakistan’s junior minister for foreign affairs, Hina Rabbani Khar, was hinting at when she said her country does not see a “partner” in Modi?

Clearly, a peace deal with Pakistan, preceded by an image makeover of Modi into statesman extraordinaire, that would put Atal Behari Vajpayee in the shade, as India sits at the head of the G-20 table, could be on the cards. The opportunity is there for the taking.

With Pakistan plunging into darkness, more than metaphorically, Gen Bajwa’s poking of the bear stems primarily from the twin challenges it faces -- the economic bleed and the army’s stretched resources – which has Pakistan with its back to the wall. When the snows melt on its mountainous border with Afghanistan, Rawalpindi GHQ would be hard put to face down the Taliban’s planned offensive this coming summer. This is when the army’s one-time proteges are expected to unleash their own cat’s paw, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

The Pakistan Army will be in Delhi’s debt if the guns fall silent on the LoC. Could India, too, not do with a respite as it faces down China on the Line of Actual Control?

“It costs the Pakistan Army 4-5 billion Pakistani rupees a month to man its border with Afghanistan. Pakistan no longer has the resources to spend $2.5 billion to police the border with India,” said an expert. Pakistan’s economy faces rising inflation, fast-depleting food stocks, and a massive power shortage. Despite the generosity of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and talks with the IMF over restructuring its debt, Pakistan’s foreign currency reserves have dropped to $5.6 billion. India’s reserves, having depleted in the past several months, is at $572 billion.

A PML-N insider says, “What we need is a trade deal with India -- open up the Wagah border, set-up a possible free trade zone, as Nawaz came close to doing before. Pakistan can import foodstuffs from India rather than pay top-dollar to import vegetables, wheat, rice from Europe.”

The army has blundered: In the rise of the Taliban, which they nurtured for over 30 years and ensconced in Kabul; in Pakistan’s economy teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, triggered by the army’s other protégé, the inept but hugely popular Imran Khan; and in drubbing the staunchly anti-army Nawaz Sharif out of office on concocted corruption charges.

Delhi and Islamabad have been here before. Back in July 1998, the Taj Samudra in Colombo was crawling with secret service personnel as then Prime Minister Vajpayee prepared to meet Pakistani counterpart Nawaz for the first time. Only a year before, Nawaz had similarly reached out to PM I K Gujral in Male, the Maldives capital.

In Colombo, Nawaz would emerge smiling from the nearly hour-long meeting with Vajpayee – it was supposed to last 30 minutes -- even as their dour Foreign Secretaries gave conflicting answers on the unaddressed stumbling blocks of Kashmir, Siachen, Sir Creek and the new nuclear bogey.

The historic Lahore summit of February 1999, when Vajpayee crossed into Pakistan through the Wagah border, would yield the landmark Lahore Declaration; only for army chief Gen Pervez Musharraf to derail it with a clandestine occupation of Kargil, a coup to overthrow Nawaz, and an Agra peace foray in July 2001 that was sketchy at best.

Musharraf’s four-point peace formula with PM Manmohan Singh, later co-opted by President Asif Ali Zardari, at Sharm-el Shaikh on the sidelines of the 2009 NAM summit, crumbled over fears of a backlash from the BJP -- Vajpayee’s Lahore and Agra forays notwithstanding – a year after the Mumbai terror attack.

With only weeks to go before Nawaz’s comeback, when he ends his exile in London, what are the prospects for a peace deal? Some 25 years after Lahore, will the army, which has reduced Pakistan to geopolitical irrelevance after the US exit from Afghanistan but continues to control the political narrative, give him a free hand?

Although, there’s talk anew of another ‘game of thrones’, with a pliable Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, Pakistan Democratic Movement’s Foreign Minister who made a splash at Davos, being groomed, the army’s new chief Gen Asim Munir says he will not interfere.

Will Nawaz be a better partner for peace? A long-time advocate of better economic ties with India, he will not be thwarted from his ultimate goal to take full control of domestic and foreign policy. He has, time and again, sought to push the army back to the barracks, end the fratricidal war which the Pakistan Army uses to predicate its role as sole arbiter of national security and lay claim to a major portion of the State’s resources. Clearly no army favourite, he now openly names and shames both Gen Bajwa and his once right-hand, the former ISI chief Gen Faiz Hameed.

Delhi has held back from acknowledging that back-channel talks arrived at a 10-point formula. Pakistani journalist Javed Chaudhary, with whom Gen Bajwa shared his India peace plan, says the Indian premier was all set to be closeted inside Hinglaj Mata, a temple in Pakistan (for nine days!) from which he would have emerged with a ‘bappi-jappi’ peace agreement with then Pakistan premier Imran Khan, putting the Kashmir issue on ice. Whether Delhi keeps to the proffer of replacing the revoked Article 370 with Article 371 in J&K, or not, the ceasefire on the LoC and the International Boundary, has held since February 2021, as has Siachen and Sir Creek.

The paradigm shift in Pakistan’s India policy is driven by internal compulsions and the realisation, as former diplomat and fighter pilot Air Vice Marshal Shahzad Chaudhry of the PPP wrote recently, of the need “to recalibrate our policy towards India…(as) a failure to do so will reduce Pakistan to a footnote in history.”

Given the number of times Indian leaders, overlooking the repeated use of terror to keep India off-balance, have had their fingers burnt, the mistrust that causes India to leave Pakistan out in the cold, even as it shores up friendly governments in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, is to be expected.

But Delhi must now decide. Should it end the calculated drumming up of Pakistan as the perennial enemy? Can it look away as a dysfunctional nuclear neighbour nears implosion, posing a threat as anti-India elements that can no longer be held in check run amok? Or would it be better to tie Pakistan in as a full-fledged trade partner in South Asia, much as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are today?

Back-channel talks between Lt Gen Faiz and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval -- at the prodding of the UAE, US and UK -- did yield results: the 10-point Bajwa-Doval plan.

Male, Colombo, Lahore, Agra, Sharm-el Shaikh…With Pakistan rewriting the lexicon of peace under a hitherto untested army-civilian compact, is it time Delhi takes a shy at another peace train?

(The writer is a senior journalist and former Foreign Affairs Editor of Gulf News who has reported from various hotspots in South Asia and the Middle East)