‘Covert’: India, Pak and the psychology of conflict

Manoj Joshi

The book is really about India and Pakistan, their neuroses and psychoses, as well as their real problems and the prospects of peace. What is new about the book is that it is mediated by a trained psychiatrist, Neil Aggarwal. This is an entirely new approach to the issue, but we can only leave it to the reader to judge whether a psychotherapist’s technique of defusing tension “by acknowledging negative emotions and shifting the approach to collaborative problem-solving”, will work in the chronic case of India and Pakistan.

The virtue of this book is that while we have a lot of Indians and Pakistanis talk past each other, here we have two protagonists, AS Dulat and Asad Durrani, talking to each other and their conversation is mediated by a well-known psychiatrist. Aggarwal is trained to cut through deceptions and obfuscations. Their conversation is frank and reflects their background of being involved in the security services of their respective countries, but is still civil.

The contemporary history of India and Pakistan is definitely something of a psychological conundrum. Whether you can come up with a Freudian understanding of the India-Pakistan psychosis is another matter, but we do know that they are of common parentage and both reject their origins in their own way. They may have had an older civilisational history, but, as nation-states, they have had a common birth. Yet, both reject their common parentage, which is from the British empire. No doubt, their approaches have been shaped by the trauma of the parent hurriedly and callously abandoning them and leaving behind a trail of blood, disruption and dislocation.

Psychologically, Pakistan is an interesting entity. It is one-fourth the size of India and yet, it has sought to maintain parity. This is not something that is unusual in familial rivalry and the India-Pak interaction does look like a sibling quarrel most of the time.

Over the decades, Pakistan has used various means to assert what can only be effective, not real, parity. It began with the creation of an army that was too big for its real needs and that army has since taken over the state, claiming to be its guarantor. The next step was an external alliance with the US, which enabled Pakistan to field a military more powerful than that of India by 1965. After being truncated in a war with India in 1971, Pakistan took the next step to develop nuclear weapons to offset India’s size and strength. And finally, since the 1980s and 1990s, it has used covert war and terrorism to try to break up India into a manageable size or at least to keep it off balance.

India, too, has had its own obsessions with Pakistan, an example being the fact that it is only after the Chinese actions in eastern Ladakh in 2020 that its Army decided to reorient itself away from the so-called Pakistani threat towards the real Chinese one. The Indian security establishment even today remains uncommonly focused on Pakistan more than anyone else.

What is possible in the India-Pakistan context is there before our eyes. Take the relationship of the two Punjabs. In 1947, both sides of the border saw massacre and mayhem of immense magnitude. Yet, today, attitudes towards Pakistan in northern India are, perhaps, most moderate in Punjab and, I dare say, on the other side as well. How this has happened is difficult to say. After all, besides the initial Partition mayhem, the period 1980-1995 or so saw a covert war being carried out in Indian Punjab from bases in Pakistan Punjab. Despite this, the kind of anti-Muslim rhetoric heard in other parts of north India is absent in Punjab.

What is possible is also visible in the 2004-2007 period when the intractable problem of Kashmir was on the verge of resolution through a process that involved both sides arriving at a compromise after a decade and a half of a Pakistan-backed insurgency.

The book highlights the importance of the Composite Dialogue process that took place between 1997 and 2008 as an important means of promoting peace between the two countries. Under this, the two sides discussed the entire range of issues between them: Jammu and Kashmir, terrorism, Siachen, Sir Creek demarcation, Tulbul navigation project, economic and commercial cooperation, and promotion of friendly exchanges.

The idea was a simultaneous dialogue on these issues and a process through which smaller problems being resolved build the momentum for solving the larger ones. Never mind that this did not quite work the way it was intended to; nevertheless, it made a major change to the texture of India-Pakistan relations.