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Sunday, March 7, 2004 |
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Sunday, March 7, 2004 |
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The Soviet Union too leaned on India, in the aftermath of the 1971 War, to move towards mending relations with Pakistan. In fact, the Soviets were mounting pressure for a mediatory role, reveals G. Parthasarathy as he recounts his years as High Commissioner to Pakistan and Consul-General in Karachi.
* * * ...amongst India’s leaders, it was Indira Gandhi who perhaps best understood how to balance the security, international and internal political dimensions of our relations with Pakistan. Why then did she go wrong in assessing Bhutto in Simla in July 1972?...Indian negotiators believed that as Bhutto was under tremendous pressure to secure the release of 93,000 Pakistan prisoners held by India, he would respond to their early release by seeking to accommodate Indian concerns on other issues. This was yet another instance of Indian inability to comprehend the Pakistani mind. Bhutto knew that international pressure would compel India, sooner rather than later, to release the Pakistani prisoners. What he urgently wanted to get back was the nearly 12,000 square kilometres of Pakistani territory that was in Indian hands at the end of the 1971 conflict. The main failing in our negotiating strategy in Simla flowed from the fact that we did not understand that Bhutto’s priority was the return of territories captured by us during the conflict and not the return of prisoners of war. We thus failed to use the return of territory as an effective bargaining chip. ‘Land for Peace’ is an argument we should have firmly used in negotiating with Pakistan after the 1971 conflict. It was the inability of Indian negotiators to understand Bhutto’s priorities that led to their playing into his hands in Simla. Bhutto’s arguments that he was just not in a position to agree to a Kashmir settlement on the basis of the status quo and that he would require time to bring his countrymen around to agreeing to this were too easily accepted at face value. Further, rather than linking Indian withdrawals from territories across the international border captured in 1971 to implementation of the assurances that Bhutto gave on Kashmir, our negotiators gave back the land captured during the 1971 conflict unconditionally. They seemed to have forgotten the cardinal principle that post-dated cheques have no value in international affairs, especially when they are signed by persons who had sworn to wage a thousand-year war against India only a few years earlier. But what is perhaps not so well known is that after assuming power Bhutto had taken two vital decisions. The first decision that he took was in January 1972 to acquire the capabilities, at any cost, for Pakistan to develop a nuclear deterrent to counter India’s conventional superiority. The second decision was to develop a more balanced relationship with the two superpowers and build bridges to the Soviet Union. This was supplemented by strong leftist rhetoric about a commitment to ‘Islamic Socialism’, while developing close ties with radical Arab States like Libya and Syria. Bhutto visited Moscow in April 1972 and appears to have held out assurances to the Soviet leadership that he would withdraw from western military pacts like CENTO and SEATO. It was implicitly made clear to the Soviet leadership that in return he expected them to lean on India to withdraw from occupied territories and release prisoners of war immediately. Around the same time, Bhutto sent hints to the Soviet leadership that their understanding would enable him to move towards concluding a treaty with the Soviet Union, similar to the Indo-Soviet Treaty of August 1971. His efforts met with immediate success. The Soviet leadership let India know that they expected us to move purposefully towards resolving issues like the return of prisoners and normalising relations with Pakistan expeditiously. (Exchanges between Bhutto and the Soviet Union on a Pakistan-Soviet Friendship Treaty continued till Bhutto was overthrown in a military coup staged by General Zia ul Haq in July 1977.) A visibly concerned Sardar Swaran Singh, who was then the Foreign Minister, accompanied by Foreign Secretary T.N. Kaul, arrived in Moscow for talks with the Soviet leadership in May 1972. (I was posted in Moscow as First Secretary (Political) at that time.) Given President Nixon’s now famous tilt against India, Indira Gandhi obviously did not want to be perceived as being insensitive to Soviet concerns. This was particularly important, as she was averse to endorsing the Brezhnev Doctrine on Collective Security in Asia. She was also determined to see that the Soviet Union did not assume a role like it did earlier in determining the course of Indo-Pakistan relations, as Prime Minister Kosygin had succeeded in doing in Tashkent in 1966. (The Tashkent Agreement was followed by the commencement of a Soviet-Pakistan Military relationship.) Any failure to reach an agreement in Simla would have led to complications in India’s entire foregin policy posture, with Soviet pressure mounting for a mediatory role. While it could be claimed that India conceded too much in Simla, it would be necessary to analyse the then prevailing international environment to understand why it was important for Mrs Gandhi to reach an agreement with Bhutto and not allow the Simla Summit to fail. The Simla Agreement did give us a number of gains. It provided a viable and realistic framework for the progressive normalisation of relations withPakistan, through the re-establishment of diplomatic relations, the promotion of people-to-people contacts, the development of trade, economic and cultural ties and the resolution of outstanding issues, including the issue of Jammu and Kashmir. More importantly, the Agreement made specific reference to the settlement of all differences through peaceful and bilateral means. The past UN Resolutions on Jammu and Kashmir were made even more redundant and irrelevant when India refused to undertake any withdrawals from areas in Jammu and Kashmir captured in 1971, leading to the replacement of the UN-mandated Ceasefire Line in Jammu and Kashmir by a new bilaterally negotiated Line of Control. The agreement also provided for both sides respecting the inviolability of this Line of Control. * * * The Simla Agreement remains the best available framework for normalising relations with Pakistan. Hawks in the Pakistan establishment like former Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar have invariably labelled the Simla Agreement as an unequal agreement, a ‘diktat’ imposed on a nation defeated in war. Sattar and others like him have consistently sought to sideline and undermine the importance of this agreement. During the Agra Summit in 2001, the astute and experienced Sattar outmanoeuvred the Indian negotiators led by their inexperienced Foreign Minister, Jaswant Singh. India came perilously close to signing a declaration that would have not made any mention of the Simla Agreement and the Lahore Declaration. What was particularly surprising about our approach to the Agra Summit was our unseemly haste in agreeing to develop an entirely new framework for bilateral relations with Pakistan, while omitting all reference to past agreements like the Simla Agreement and the Lahore Declaration, that had been concluded with democratically elected governments in Pakistan. Mercifully, better sense ultimately prevailed in Agra and we realised that no useful purpose would be served by pandering to the Kashmir-centric obsessions of General Musharraf. There is a tendency in the Indian media and amongst sections of our intelligentsia to suggest that with time we should be ‘flexible’ and forget the past and seek new and innovative approaches and frameworks to our relations with Pakistan. While such sentiments are unexceptionable, they betray a total ignorance of the complex nature of our relations with our western neighbour. (Excerpted from Diplomatic Divide by Dr Humayun Khan and G. Parthasarathy. Series editor David Page. Lotus Collection, Roli Books.) |
WHEN India and Pakistan resumed diplomatic relations
in 1975, after the 1971 Bangladesh conflict... New Delhi was
particularly keen that past hostilities should be subsumed in
wide-ranging cooperation and increasing human interaction. Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi had taken the assurances given by Zulfiqar Ali
Bhutto when they met in Simla in July 1972 at face value and presumed
that as the climate of relations improved, an atmosphere would be
created in which the vexed Kashmir issue could be resolved, by
formalising the status quo.