Churning in Islamabad: What does it mean for India?

The ruling of Pakistan’s Supreme Court against Imran Khan’s constitutional coup may eventually lead to the PTI chief being replaced by the PML (N) leader Shehbaz Sharif as the next prime minister. As the chief minister of the Punjab province of Pakistan, Shehbaz has proved himself to be a hard-working and able administrator. However, he may not like to rule for too long in the current difficult circumstances and thereby incur the burden of anti-incumbency for his party. The opposition unity may also not last. Therefore, though Imran Khan’s attempt to precipitate the national election has failed, Pakistan is likely to go to the polls earlier than when it would have normally happened – in the second half of 2023.

Sensing the gathering political storm and with an eye on the future political battles, Khan already started a campaign to present himself as a nationalist and victim of a foreign conspiracy – someone, who is defending Pakistan’s interests against external pressures. He sought to buttress this image with the dubious claim of a threat from the US of adverse consequences for Pakistan in case he stayed in office. This also goes down well with his conservative religious constituency. His emphasis on an independent foreign policy is logical in view of Pakistan’s past Faustian bargains (like joining the Western bloc in the Cold War and becoming a lead player in the Afghan jihad) but sounds opportunistic at this juncture.

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So does his repeated endorsement of India’s independent foreign policy, particularly in the backdrop of his having painted himself into a corner by linking bilateral dialogue with the improbable condition of India reversing its August 5, 2019 decision to strip Jammu and Kashmir of its special status and reorganize the state into two union territories.

Differences between Khan and the chief of the Pakistan Army, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, are now in the open. In his speech at the Islamabad Security Dialogue in early April, Bajwa struck a note markedly different from the policies articulated by Khan during his stint as the prime minister. The army chief not only spoke about a long and excellent strategic relationship with the US but also criticised Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The political drama in Pakistan has attracted a good deal of attention in India. However, since Pakistan’s foreign and security policies are tightly controlled by its army, the fate of a civilian leader can at best impact its external posture and key relationships only marginally. The army has repeatedly sabotaged peace moves by the civilian leaders. The collapse of Nawaz Sharif’s moves to build a better relationship with India illustrates this point. The promise of his initiative in hosting Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Lahore in February 1999 was put paid to by the Kargil incursion led by Gen Pervez Musharraf. During the campaign for the 2013 elections, which brought him back to the office of the prime minister for the third time, Nawaz repeatedly spoke of improving relations with India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi would surely have seen some value in him as an interlocutor while deciding to make a halt in Lahore on his way back from Kabul in December 2015. However, Pakistan’s all-powerful army systematically sabotaged Nawaz Sharif’s India agenda yet again by ramping up terrorism, including the Pathankot terror attack within days of Modi’s Lahore halt.

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Further, the focus of the new government in Pakistan will be on the next election and alleviating the economic suffering of the people, thus making any major foreign policy initiatives highly unlikely.

The predominantly Punjabi army has dominated the Pakistani polity throughout its existence – its role bolstered, inter alia, by the failure of Pakistan’s creators to give it a stable, democratic political system and the country coming to regard itself as a national security state ranged against the external “Indian threat”. Positioning itself as the defender of Pakistan’s physical and ideological frontiers, the army has remained the prime mover of Pakistan’s hostility against India and has sought to sustain the “India bogey” through low-level tensions with India, in its institutional interest. However, when in a tight corner, it has not hesitated to make a tactical retreat. Zia-ul-Haq’s ‘charm offensive’ towards India after his western border heated up due to the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union and Pervez Musharraf’s constructive engagement with India post the pulls and pressures generated by 9/11 are some examples.

General Bajwa has continued to send apparently conciliatory signals to India from time to time. In the absence of any credible evidence of a strategic shift in the above-stated world-view of the Pakistan Army, these can at best be regarded as tactical moves, necessitated by Pakistan’s floundering economy, its increasingly patchy relationship with the US, continuing volatility on its western frontier and the scrutiny by the Financial Action Task Force. It is these considerations that led Pakistan to restore the LoC ceasefire in February 2021 – a move that also suited the Indian need to pay greater attention to the LAC with China.

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Bajwa has remained a leading voice in Pakistan’s discourse on a shift from geopolitics to geoeconomics – a concept that also finds a place in Pakistan’s National Security Policy unveiled in January this year. He spoke of resolving all outstanding issues with India, including Kashmir, through diplomacy and dialogue at the recently held Islamabad Security Dialogue. At the same time, he played up the recent accidental firing of an Indian missile and referred to the need for quick resolution of the India-China border dispute through dialogue, thus making a common cause with China against India.

Pakistan’s emphasis on geoeconomics, while denying trade and transit to India, makes little sense. Its volubility on the need to resolve Kashmir has been matched by its reluctance to work and settle for a practical, forward-looking and mutually acceptable solution. However, this should not stop India from exploring further the intent of Pakistan, even if tactical, to at the very least manage this complex relationship better than the last few years and possibly take some steps back to the point from where it had nosedived, especially 2016 onwards. I have in mind, in particular, the resumption of trade suspended by Pakistan since August 2019 (there is a demand to this effect from segments of trade and industry within Pakistan) and up-gradation of diplomatic relations back to the level of the High Commissioners to have senior interlocutors in each other’s capital.

(The writer is India’s former High Commissioner to Pakistan and is the author of the forthcoming book, India’s Pakistan Conundrum- Managing a Complex Relationship).

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