India-Russia nuclear talks hit liability snag

Russian suppliers do not want any liability for accidents in India ...







30 July 2010
The Hindu

India-Russia nuclear talks hit liability snag

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: It is not just American suppliers, Russia too is now insisting that all liability for any accident that may occur in reactors sold to India must rest solely with the Indian operator and not with Russian companies involved in supplying components and knowhow.

At the last round of commercial negotiations held in Moscow recently between the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL) and Atomstroyexport for the supply of four additional 1000 MWe reactors at Kudankulam (KK 3,4,5,6), the two countries failed to agree on the issue of liability. The Indian side wanted the contract to include a ‘right of recourse' which would allow NPCIL to claim damages from Atomstroyexport in the event of an accident resulting from negligence on the part of the Russian supplier. But Russian officials refused, citing the Inter-Governmental Agreement (IGA) the two countries signed in 2008 to back up their stand that all liability must be channelled on to NPCIL, the operator at Kudankulam.

Indeed, the IGA which India and Russia finalised in February 2008 and signed in December that year is clear on this point. Though the agreement has not been made public, The Hindu has accessed the text. Article 13 states: “The Indian Side and its authorised organisation at any time and at all stages of the construction and operation of the NPP power units to be constructed under the present Agreement shall be the Operator of power units of the NPP at the Kudankulam Site and be fully responsible for any damage both within and outside the territory of the Republic of India caused to any person and property as a result of a nuclear incident occurring at the NPP.”

Since Article 13 does not provide for the operator's right of recourse — a standard part of international conventions on civil nuclear liability — the Russian side says India's insistence on its inclusion in the commercial contract runs counter to the IGA.

Indian officials acknowledge the lacuna but put it down to India's weak negotiating hand in the days before the Nuclear Suppliers Group voted to lift its export ban on the country in September 2008. The language on liability was copied verbatim from the agreement for the first two Kudankulam reactors, though India — which is in the market for a mammoth 20,000 MWe of imported reactor capacity — is likely to drive a harder bargain in future negotiations with Russia.

More hurdles

Nevertheless, the current stand-off is likely to further complicate the Manmohan Singh government's efforts to pass a nuclear liability law that is acceptable to all domestic stakeholders and foreign partners.

The draft law includes three grounds for the Indian nuclear operator to invoke a right of recourse against its foreign suppliers. India is under pressure from the U.S. to dilute one of those provisions — Section 17(b) — which allows for claims in the event of negligence. Diplomatic sources told The Hindu that Russia was also uncomfortable with this clause.

Though Russia is refusing to include a right of recourse for the Kudankulam reactors, the 1963 Vienna Convention on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage — which the Russian Federation acceded to in 2005 — allows for such a right if expressly provided for by a contract in writing.

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The Ramnath Goenka Award...

On July 22, I received the Ramnath Goenka Award for Journalist of the Year (Print) for 2008-9 from the President of India, Pratibha Devisingh Patil. The award was for my work in 2007-2008.

This is the citation, as read out at the ceremony:



JOURNALIST OF THE YEAR (PRINT)

Siddharth Varadarajan of The Hindu: For his consistent reporting of strategic affairs — on the Indian Safeguards Agreement process at the IAEA and the Nuclear Supplies Group and on the last-minute wrinkles in the 123 agreement. And for his insightful analysis, and often contrarian perspective, of the strategic policy establishment.

The image above is from the Indian Express of July 25, 2010.

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DIPLOMATIC NOTEBOOK: Facing up to the Myanmar challenge

India's heart may be with Aung San Suu Kyi and the struggle for democracy but its head knows there's no alternative to dealing with the military. Is there a middle path?








27 July 2010
The Hindu

DIPLOMATIC NOTEBOOK
Facing up to the Myanmar challenge

Siddharth Varadarajan

Senior General Than Shwe, head of Myanmar's military government, is not a man who travels outside his country very often. So the fact that he will spend five days in India this week and be given a ceremonial reception in New Delhi on Tuesday has raised eyebrows around the world.

Most international commentators have noted the obvious contradiction of how a nation with a proud democratic tradition is playing host to a dictator. India's special relationship with Myanmar is said by western critics to be a good example of what happens when countries formulate their foreign policy based on realpolitik rather than morality and principles. In 2006, George W. Bush made a pitch for India to join the United States in isolating the military regime. “India's leadership is needed in a world that is hungry for freedom”, he said in a speech at the Purana Qila in Delhi. Naming Burma and a few other countries, he said India and the U.S. “must stand with reformers and dissidents and civil society organizations, and hasten the day when the people of these nations can determine their own future and choose their own leaders”.

Fine words, but the reality is a little more complex. There was a time when India stood on the side of the angels in Burma. In the early 1990s, it backed Aung San Suu Kyi in her opposition to the State Law and Order Restoration Committee (SLORC), as the military dictatorship was known back then. But as bilateral relations grew frosty, New Delhi saw itself lose out to China. The generals forgave Beijing for its long-standing support to the Burmese Communist Party and other armed rebels and pushed for Chinese investments and political support. Indian policy makers also worried about the activities of insurgent groups in the North-East and their use of Burmese territory as a safe haven. Starting in the mid-1990s, therefore, a course correction was effected. New Delhi began engaging with SLORC (and its current avatar, the State Peace and Development Council), dropped its vocal support for Daw Suu Kyi and, in a sense, has never looked back since.

Whenever the Indian government has had second thoughts, or come under western pressure to re-evaluate its approach to the military regime, it has baulked at changing course for fear of giving a greater handle to the Chinese. Though China has made spectacular inroads, it remains wary of Indian influence there. Not surprisingly, the generals in Myanmar have become quite adept at playing Beijing off against New Delhi. Each of these rising powers is insecure enough about the other to pander to the endless demands of the Burmese junta for economic assistance and political legitimacy.

One way to break this cycle is for India and China to have a frank dialogue with each other about Myanmar and to see if a win-win situation can be brought about in which the military regime agrees to ‘normalise' the economic and political situation in the country. If the West's policy of sanctions and boycotts has failed to make a dent, India and China ought jointly to leverage their engagement with the regime to help bring about some improvement in the conditions of the Burmese people.

An India-China JV

This, in turn, begs the question of whether India and China have enough in common to think about a common approach. At first blush, their interests seem orthogonal. In strategic terms, China is interested in Myanmar as a cargo and energy transit route along a south-north axis running from Sittwe in the Bay of Bengal to Yunnan province. For India, however, the west-east transit axis is crucial since Myanmar is a missing link both for better connectivity with north-eastern states like Mizoram and with the wider Asean region. Unless Myanmar comes up to speed, the trans-Asian railroad and highway will remain incomplete.

China, which has not been an enthusiastic supporter of India's integration with ‘East Asia' might arguably have a stake in disrupting this west-east connectivity. But Beijing also knows the forces of political economy in a networked world cannot forever be held at bay by the lack of border infrastructure. Indeed, the benefits that will accrue to Myanmar as a result of its emergence as a transit route along multiple axes will generate positive externalities for China as well.

Similarly, India has no reason to fear the Chinese plans for a natural gas pipeline from Sittwe to Kunming; if anything, by making China less insecure about the vulnerability of its sea lines of communication, such infrastructure may actually lead to a scaling back of Beijing's plans for an expansion of its naval fleet.

India and China compete for Myanmar's offshore gas but there are other markets in the fray too like Thailand and there is no reason for energy to become a zero-sum game. India lost out in 2006 not so much because of Chinese competition but because Delhi's inability to work out a transit plan through Bangladesh meant it had no immediate use for the gas being produced. Today, given Myanmar's potential in both natural gas and hydroelectric power, there is enough to keep Indian companies like OVL and NHPC gainfully occupied in the long-term even as Chinese companies operate.

One more guided democracy

In a pre-emptive move against growing international and domestic pressure for change, the generals in Nay Pyi Taw have begun laying the groundwork for the transition to a ‘managed democracy'. In April, Prime Minister Thein Sein hung up his uniform and announced the formation of the Union for Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). The USDP, which has subsumed the activities of Myanmar's biggest government-organised NGO, the Union for Solidarity an Development Association, will be the army's designated political vehicle when national elections are held, presumably later in 2010.

Though the results of the election are a foregone conclusion, the National League for Democracy ought to reassess its decision to boycott the process. There is no way the NLD will be allowed to surprise the military's party the way it did in 1990 and Daw Suu Kyi cannot participate since the rules bar prisoners from being members of political parties. But a boycott will be effective only if the NLD can mobilise enough support on the streets and if the military fears the adverse impact this would have on its international standing. Neither of these conditions hold. The SPDC has already hit rock bottom in the global popularity stake and the opposition's chances of paralysing Yangon, Mandalay and the new capital of Nay Pyi Taw are low indeed. Given how well-entrenched the military is and given the South-East Asia region's preference for ‘order', a ‘guided democracy' is the best that can be hoped for under the present circumstances. But even this would be a huge improvement over the current stalemate and would open up political spaces that Daw Suu Kyi and the NLD could slowly utilise.

In 2000, when the SPDC last began experimenting with its version of political reconciliation, the Bush administration and the rest of the west took a dogmatic, all-or-nothing, stand. The result was that Daw Suu Kyi was sent back to jail. Khin Nyunt, the powerful intelligence chief who convinced his military colleagues that a limited relaxation at home would open doors abroad, ended up getting purged. To the extent to which India's word still counts, it should urge the NLD and others to participate in the upcoming election. And it should tell the senior general that if he is prepared to liberalise politically, New Delhi will do its bit to help end Myanmar's international isolation.

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DIPLOMATIC NOTEBOOK: For Krishna, a year of hectic travel

The External Affairs Minister has visited 27 countries in 12 months. With his frequent flyer miles has come greater confidence but Indian diplomacy is still plagued by mixed messages...





20 July 2010
The Hindu

DIPLOMATIC NOTEBOOK
In a year of hectic travel, Krishna has clocked 27 countries

Siddharth Varadarajan

Some ministers treat international travel as a “junket”, others regard it an unwelcome burden. But if there is one man whose job requires the accumulation of frequent flyer miles, it is S.M. Krishna, who has emerged as India's most mobile external affairs minister in recent years.

When he touched down in Islamabad last week, Mr. Krishna notched up his 27th country in 12 months, a punishing pace of travel that marks a dramatic change from the less frenetic — and somewhat sedate — schedules of some of his predecessors.

Mr. Krishna came to South Block in June 2009, when he replaced Pranab Mukherjee at the Ministry of External Affairs. Mr. Mukherjee's willingness to fly out was greater than that of his predecessor, Natwar Singh, but he was also overburdened with domestic responsibilities. That said, the present incumbent's record both in terms of miles flown — some of them in ‘cattle class' — and range of destinations is impressive by any standard. In the past year, he has been to Bhutan (twice), Italy, the Czech Republic, Japan, Egypt, Thailand, Singapore (twice), Australia, Brazil (twice), Belarus, Turkmenistan, the United States (thrice), Russia, Afghanistan, Trinidad, Myanmar, U.K., Kuwait, Nepal, China, Uzbekistan (twice), Kazakhstan, Iran, South Korea, Mauritius, Mozambique and Pakistan. This week, he visited Kabul again.

The past two months alone have seen him fly to southern Africa, East Asia, West Asia, North America and Central America. All told, Mr. Krishna has been to every permanent member of the U.N. Security Council (except France), as well as to countries and regions where EAMs seldom go calling. Some of these visits have been of the routine goodwill variety and some have been firefighting missions — a case in point being the sudden trip to Australia to register India's unhappiness at the spate of attacks on Indian students. But most visits have involved a substantial bilateral agenda.

Curiously, India's immediate region is somewhat underrepresented. Myanmar, Bhutan and Afghanistan have seen ministerial visits but not Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and the Maldives.

It may seem paradoxical that Mr. Krishna is travelling much more than his predecessors in an era when the role of the Prime Minister and his National Security Adviser as foreign policy drivers has become more pronounced. And yet, the fact is that an ever expanding calendar of multilateral events has begun to circumscribe the possibilities of bilateral diplomatic engagement at the highest level. Every year, for example, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has to attend the G-20 summit twice, the East Asia Summit, the India-EU summit and the U.N. General Assembly. Every other year there are the BRIC, IBSA, NAM, and CHOGM summits, not to speak of routinised annual bilateral events with ‘strategic partners' or thematic summits like those that were held recently on climate change and nuclear security. The pressure is such that the Prime Minister has stopped going to the UNGA every year and has no time for other meetings like those of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, CICA and G-15.

Under these circumstances, the task of holding the multilateral fort and crafting new bilateral agendas falls largely upon the shoulders of the EAM. And though a “rising” India has the ability to function as a magnet for inbound visitors, much also depends on the willingness of its foreign minister to spread his wings and take flight.

No need for minders

Diplomacy, of course, is not just about going the distance, it is also about the messages conveyed. And with Mr. Krishna's frequent flyers miles has come confidence, though, unfortunately, some officials still insist on prompting him, not always with the best of effects.

When he was first named to the job, some observers looked askance at the former Karnataka Chief Minister's lack of foreign policy experience. Though his early public interactions seemed overly scripted, Mr. Krishna's measured performance in Pakistan last week took his critics by surprise. If the visit did not yield a positive outcome, this was not for any failing on his part but because of factors beyond his control: Pakistan's attitude, the Manmohan Singh government's decision to limit the scope of dialogue, and the remarks on the ISI made before the delegation's arrival in Islamabad by Union Home Secretary Gopal Pillai.

Some opposition leaders have asked why Mr. Krishna did not contradict the Pakistani Foreign Minister when he made a reference to Mr. Pillai's remarks. Opinions can differ but Mr. Krishna made what he thought was a sensible judgment call under the circumstances: the press conference had already turned unpleasant and he decided not to prolong the encounter.

That the press conference took a nose dive towards the end was unfortunate. Just before that, Mr. Krishna had fielded a difficult and even provocatively phrased question on Kashmir. This is where his experience as a seasoned politician came in handy. He was mindful of his location and audience and spoke with great tact and precision, giving the official Indian position on Kashmir and human rights violations. Mr. Qureshi also gave an answer that reflected Pakistan's position but did not cross any diplomatic red lines. Unfortunately, an MEA official, who perhaps felt Mr. Krishna had not given the right answer, handed a note to him on infiltration from Pakistan which the minister then proceeded to read out as soon as Mr. Qureshi was done with his answer. This interruption in the rhythm of the press conference — comebacks in such events are rare and media handlers strongly discourage them because of the risk of an adversarial exchange — prompted the Pakistani minister to respond in a testy manner. From there on, matters rapidly went south.

Pillai's solo flight

The issue has acquired extreme sensitivity so no one will agree to speak about this on record but this much can be stated with absolute certainty: Home Secretary G.K. Pillai was on a solo flight when he told The Indian Express on the eve of Mr. Krishna's visit to Islamabad that the ISI was involved in the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai from “the beginning till the end.”

Though people in Pakistan saw some great design at work, there can be no question of the MEA having been consulted or even informed beforehand of the bombshell Mr. Pillai was about to drop. This is because the MEA, despite repeatedly asking the Home Ministry for details, is still completely in the dark about what Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist David Coleman Headley told Indian investigators in Chicago last month! Worse, the Prime Minister's Office, which is in the Headley loop, was also caught unaware by Mr. Pillai's statement.

Since the public airing of this accusation came barely three weeks after Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram met his Pakistani counterpart, it is likely Mr. Pillai's boss was also taken by surprise. Just as he was last year, when the Home Secretary declared that Hyderabad would be the capital of Telangana. Government officials have since publicly circled their wagons around Mr. Pillai but privately there is considerable criticism being voiced within. One source compared the Home Secretary's statement to the solo flight of Matthias Rust, the amateur German aviator who piloted a Cessna all the way to the Soviet Union in 1987. “Rust landed his plane in the Red Square. Mr. Pillai took his flight all the way to the Minar-e-Pakistan,” the source told The Hindu.

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Timeline on Siachen, Kashmir talks was the deal-breaker at Islamabad

Pakistan Foreign Minister Qureshi overruled his officials over draft of common talking points ...




18 July 2010
The Hindu

Timeline on Siachen, Kashmir talks was the deal-breaker at Islamabad

Siddharth Varadarajan

India and Pakistan had agreed to a rough schedule of meetings between different sets of officials as envisaged by the composite dialogue process but the inability of the Indian negotiators to firmly commit to a resumption of Defence Secretary-level talks on Siachen led Pakistan's Foreign Minister to walk away from the deal at hand.

Nevertheless, according to sources on the Indian side, the fact that the two countries agreed dialogue was the only way forward meant the Foreign Ministers' meeting was still “positive”. Another plus was the Pakistani side's acknowledgment — for the first time since 2008 — that the gains made in back channel talks on Kashmir during the Musharraf years “were important and useful,” the sources told The Hindu on Saturday.

The sources said External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna travelled to Islamabad with a proposal that would have seen the two sides beginning talks on trade, tourism and other issues almost immediately while leaving formal parleys on Jammu and Kashmir, ‘Peace and Security', and Siachen for a later date with the foreign secretaries to be tasked with working out the modalities for that.

“We wanted to move ahead with CBMs first because they are easier,” the sources said. “We made it clear we were willing to discuss the other three issues too but said we need a certain catalysing process. They are more complex so it is better to start with what is more easily achievable.”

“Since June, we had been talking of starting meetings between various secretaries — commerce, water resources, culture — and the Pakistanis were very much on board with this idea,” the sources said.

Sir Creek

On Sir Creek, India said it was ready to discuss any Pakistani response to its last proposal and was willing to hold a meeting of the Surveyor-General from the Indian side and the Additional Secretary of the Defence Ministry from the Pakistani side.

The sources said officials from both sides worked past lunch on July 15 to produce a draft of common talking points for the joint ministerial press conference that was scheduled for later that day. Though not a joint statement, the draft spelt out a mutually acceptable framework for future meetings and included language that worked around obvious differences on a timeline for the resumption of talks on Siachen and Kashmir.

But when the Pakistani side sent the draft to Shah Mahmood Qureshi for his approval, the Minister shot it down, the Indian sources said. Pakistani officials were not available for comment.

Mr. Qureshi had an all-or-nothing attitude, the sources said. “They wanted us to accept a calendar of meetings which would have amounted to a resumption of the composite dialogue in all but name … It seems there was a lot of emphasis on optics from their side. They want to put Humpty Dumpty together again. But the fact is [he] fell off the wall. It is not as if we can immediately go back to the situation pre-Mumbai … We need progress on terrorism.”

The sources said India was proposing that action on the terror front would “catalyse” the process of talking on what Pakistan considered ‘core issues'. “But we didn't put specific goalposts other than to say action against terrorism should be expeditious and should lead to the unravelling of the Mumbai conspiracy.”

Fresh efforts were then made to rework the language of the ‘talking points'. This time, the Pakistanis wanted specific timelines for the resumption of discussion on Kashmir, peace and security, and Siachen. Since it was a given that the two Foreign Secretaries — who normally handle Kashmir and ‘peace and security' in the composite dialogue — would be meeting again, it was relatively easy to blur over the fact that India had not yet agreed formally to resume discussions on the subject. But Siachen proved a harder nut to crack. Apart from the absence of a timeline, the Indian desire to refer to future interlocutors on the subject as “relevant officials” rather than the two Defence Secretaries was another obstacle. As the evening wore on, the Indian side, which acknowledges being in touch with New Delhi on several points, categorically told the Pakistanis that their mandate did not include agreeing to a firm commitment to resume dialogue on Siachen.

Though the heights of Siachen proved insurmountable, the sources say other factors may also have been at play in ensuring the talks ended inconclusively. The Pakistani side did tell the Indians how Home Secretary Gopal Pillai's statements on the involvement of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate in the Mumbai attack had evoked anger in Islamabad.

Asked about Mr. Qureshi's claim of “instructions” being sent from Delhi, the sources said this was natural and that he too left the room with his officials at one point. “Clearly he was answering to a higher authority. And though he is a Maqdoom, that authority was not God!,” they added.

The sources said it was unfortunate that the “petulance” of Mr. Qureshi's remarks on Thursday and Friday had deflected attention away from what the two sides had discussed and highlighted only the “atmospherics”. But they said India intended to keep its own rhetoric down so as to allow temperatures to subside.

The Indian side acknowledges that as matters stand, there are no official meetings planned or scheduled between now and December, when Mr. Qureshi indicated he might come to Delhi for a return visit. But the sources hoped the Pakistani side would realise the need to continue engagement. A meeting of the bilateral judicial commission to review the question of prisoner repatriation is due and India hopes Pakistan will convene it soon.

The sources said that although Mr. Krishna and Mr. Qureshi will be in Kabul next week for an international conference, no meeting between them was being envisaged as of now.

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The perils of ‘half-way house’ diplomacy

Having decided to engage Pakistan on issues beyond terror, it is counterproductive for India to artificially limit the subjects it is willing to discuss.





17 July 2010
The Hindu

The perils of ‘half-way house’ diplomacy

Siddharth Varadarajan

Future diplomatic historians will, no doubt, tell a more complex story but the broad outlines of External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna's less-than-successful visit to Islamabad seem clear enough.

Having hosted Home Minister P. Chidambaram three weeks back and heard firsthand from him exactly what India wanted on the terrorism front, the Pakistani side's expectation from the foreign minister-level meeting was that there would be discussion and, presumably, some agreement on a wider set of issues.

In the run-up to the meeting, Indian officials, too, had let it be known that they were looking at a range of subjects like trade and people-to-people contact as a way of building trust. When he arrived in Islamabad, Mr. Krishna said India was ready to discuss all outstanding issues.

Pakistan knew the formal resumption of the composite dialogue — or some updated variant of it — was still some distance away. It was also prepared to discuss the deepening of confidence building measures as a stepping stone. But it was wary of publicly accepting a formula or roadmap for engagement that frontloads not just terrorism but every other issue that India considers important while leaving issues that Islamabad considers ‘core' to an unlit backburner for future ‘warming up.'

The irony is that these issues — Jammu and Kashmir, peace and security, Siachen and Sir Creek — are subjects India and Pakistan have wasted several years of formal dialogue over without either side budging one bit.

For example, Indian soldiers remain firmly perched upon the Siachen glacier's commanding heights despite officials from the defence ministries of India and Pakistan having held several rounds of talks. Many more rounds can safely be held without our jawans being required to come down by even one metre — if that is what the government wants. Given the long-standing deadlock over proposals for verification of a mutual withdrawal, the Pakistani side knows nothing would be gained by yet another meeting of defence secretaries.

But the civilian government which is struggling to assert its authority against multiple power centres within and even outside the ‘establishment' needed something to show for its diplomatic exertions.

The Indian delegation, however, did not come to Islamabad with a mandate flexible enough to accommodate the need for these kind of harmless optics. Worse, their limited mandate was undermined from within by Union Home Secretary G.K. Pillai's accusation that the Pakistan state — with which Mr. Krishna was going to sit down and have talks — had planned the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi was undiplomatic in mentioning Mr. Pillai's unhelpful remarks in the same breath as Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Saeed's inflammatory speeches against India.

But people on the Indian side need to ask what the home secretary hoped to achieve by saying the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate of the Pakistan army had been involved in 26/11 “from the beginning till the end.” Indian investigators had questioned Lashkar operative David Coleman Headley well before Mr. Chidambaram and Mr. Pillai held talks with their Pakistani counterparts in Islamabad last month. One can only presume this question of ISI involvement “from the beginning till the end” was raised by them with Rehman Malik.

In Islamabad, Mr. Chidambaram told reporters that India wanted Pakistan to vigorously investigate and follow up the leads available in the Mumbai terror attacks. He said he was leaving Pakistan with the conviction that “[Mr. Malik and I] have exchanged views, understood the situation and agreed that we should address the situation with the seriousness it deserves.”

Three weeks have elapsed since the Home Minister made that statement. Is that time enough to form a judgment on Pakistan's “seriousness”, let alone decide to gut the possibility of its cooperation by making a public accusation of state complicity?

At stake is not the veracity of Headley's information — though it is worth asking why the statements of a terrorist who helped attack Mumbai in order to get India and Pakistan to go to war should be taken at face value — but the utility of levelling a serious charge in public. Did Mr. Pillai or his advisers do a cost-benefit analysis beforehand and conclude that blaming the ISI in this manner on the eve of the foreign minister's talks would make Pakistan more likely to address India's concerns about terrorism?

If Mr. Pillai's comments on the ISI betray a failure of the government to think strategically, the decision to postpone any front-channel discussion on issues like Siachen and Kashmir till there is greater “trust” is also deeply flawed.

In politics, the default option is often the easiest one to take. Having suspended the composite dialogue in the wake of the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, it would have been quite simple for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to keep the dialogue process under suspension indefinitely. There would be no need for him to explain anything to anybody. But just as Atal Bihari Vajpayee had the courage to invite Pervez Musharraf, the architect of Kargil, to Agra in 2001, or to travel to Islamabad in January 2004 despite cross-border terrorism not ending, Dr. Singh was brave enough to say that not talking to Pakistan indefinitely was a bad option.

The Prime Minister showed enormous political courage at Sharm el-Sheikh last year and againt at Thimphu in making a case for engagement. He knew full well that his decision would run against the grain of both hawkish political sentiment and the risk-averse attitudes of the security establishment. But in a concession to these quarters, his advisers came up with the constraining formula of 'incremental dialogue'.

In the wake of the acrimony that Mr. Krishna's visit has produced, the government's critics in the opposition and the ‘retirati' are likely to say Dr. Singh was wrong to try engagement. That would be an incorrect conclusion. Thursday's fruitless talks and the rather churlish comments of Mr. Qureshi since then are not the product of dialogue and engagement but of the half-way house that Indian officials have parked themselves in.

Dr. Singh was bold enough to steer India away from the rigid position of no dialogue but he should have been bolder still in recognising that indulging Pakistan's desire for official talks on Kashmir, Siachen and other ‘core issues' would cost India nothing and would actually be a cheap way of moving the CBMs process forward.

India's current rigidity on this question is counter-productive. No doubt Dr. Singh is wary of how a more open attitude towards the resumption of dialogue would play. All democracies — and many non-democracies — have to worry about public opinion. But in this particular case, the burden of good optics weighs much more heavily on the civilian government in Pakistan than it does on the UPA government in India.

If India looked at the problem strategically, it would recognise the importance of not allowing jihadi and extremist forces in Pakistan to depict the civilian government as an entity which meekly surrenders to Indian positions.

Anti-Indianism is the glue that the terrorists and their backers in Pakistan use to bond with a public which is otherwise under daily attack by them. The creation of a dialogue structure which allows the Pakistani side to hold its head high domestically against extremists of all hues is what India should be striving for, especially at a time when the attack on the Data Ganj Bakhsh shrine in Lahore has outraged the Pakistani people.

Mr. Qureshi may have been abrasive and tactless in many of things he said but his remarks on Balochistan and Kashmir and even infiltration (‘deal firmly with them and we will back you') led hawkish journalists to attack him as pro-Indian. India is dealing with the complexity of a sharply divided Pakistani establishment and society. It should resist the temptation of matching Mr. Qureshi's desperate grandstanding and instead think deeply about how the process of engagement which has started can be broadened and deepened.

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Substantive dialogue is still some distance away

Instability on the AfPak front — and not the lack of trust — has emerged as the binding constraint on India's ability to move bilateral talks on Kashmir forward...





14 July 2010
The Hindu

Substantive dialogue is still some distance away

Siddharth Varadarajan

As India and Pakistan move the latest phase of their engagement to the foreign minister level, a curious shift in national attitudes and priorities on the bilateral front is now evident.

Earlier, it was New Delhi that expressed its inability to resume a substantial dialogue on the ‘core' dispute of Kashmir unless the terrorism issue was addressed. On its part, Islamabad treated with suspicion any suggestion that talks could be held on secondary questions first while Kashmir was postponed to a later date. So it was that a feeble attempt India made last September to talk about only humanitarian issues at the Joint Secretary level pending the eventual resumption of “substantive dialogue” never got off the ground. Nine months later, the Indian side has come around to the view that the “complex negotiations” on Kashmir which took place in the back channel with Pakistan from 2004 to 2007 were leading to a favourable outcome and ought to be revived, even if total satisfaction on the terrorism front is not forthcoming. But it is the Pakistani side which today is in no position to pick up the threads of the Kashmir dialogue.

The official Indian perception of the reason why this is so is that the Pakistani military never fully backed the Musharraf formula of leaving the territorial status quo in Jammu and Kashmir intact while evolving ways of making the Line of Control irrelevant for the people of the state. In an essay for the Harvard International Review in 2009 written before he was named National Security Adviser, Shivshankar Menon said India had two worries about the back channel — whether future governments in Pakistan would respect any agreement which emerged and whether the “internally omnipotent Pakistan Army” was on board. “The first question was never put to the test and remains unanswered”, he said. “All too soon the second was answered in the negative”.

In an all the Track-II meetings I have taken part in with Pakistani analysts, politicians and ex-officials in recent months, it has become abundantly clear that virtually no section of the political, bureaucratic or military establishment is willing to buy in to the back channel. For the politicians, the problem with the emerging Kashmir formula lies with Musharraf's paternity, which they are reluctant to embrace; as for the bureaucrats, they resent the role played by an outsider like Tariq Aziz. Each of these aversions can be remedied quite easily but unless the reasons for the military's opposition are understood, any attempt to revive the back channel is bound to flounder.

As long as the Pakistani military feels it has better options in hand, it will not support the kind of back-channel dialogue which took place earlier. One can argue that the traditional Pakistani approach of supporting separatism, militancy and terrorism is hardly likely to succeed but the metric for success the army brass is looking at is not a favourable outcome in Kashmir. What is at stake are options that help to entrench the military as the most powerful and indispensable institution in the country in the years ahead, when the demands for genuine democracy and federalism become more insistent.

For the moment, the Pakistani military's attitude towards the back channel, Kashmir and India is strictly a function of the cards it believes it holds in the wider ‘AfPak' game. This is a game full of peril and promise, where the potential for strategic gains for it are evenly matched by the prospect of catastrophe. For decades, the establishment nurtured extremist groups which acted as force multipliers against democratic forces within as well as against India and Afghanistan. If Musharraf was willing to look at the possibility of reaching an agreement with India in Kashmir, this was mainly because internal political circumstances and the Bush administration's blunders in Iraq meant the military establishment was not under pressure to surrender positions on the domestic and Afghan fronts. Both of these equations began to change from 2007 onward. The lawyers' movement, the return of civilian rule and the American surge in Afghanistan have rendered the establishment's assets and interests vulnerable all round. Under the new circumstances, a settlement in Kashmir would jeopardise the ability of the army to project itself as the custodian of Pakistan against a perpetually hostile India.

Even if the establishment had no direct hand in the November 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai, the ensuing tension was helpful because it gave the Pakistani army an alibi to resist American pressure to do more on the Afghan front. Though the Manmohan Singh government almost immediately indicated that it had no intention of taking military action, the absence of dialogue for more than a year allowed Islamabad to keep up the illusion that the primary threat confronting the country was India and not terrorism. Today, with Pakistan under pressure to open the North Waziristan battle front, New Delhi's willingness to resume sustained high-level dialogue is aimed as much at making bilateral gains and building trust as at creating a conducive regional atmosphere for military operations against the Taliban and other extremist groups.

The attempted bombing of Times Square in New York by a terrorist with links to Pakistan-based groups and the recent suicide attack on the shrine of Data Ganj Bakhsh in Lahore also mean the domestic and international alignment of stars is the most propitious for such an undertaking. But India has a vital role to play in not giving the Pakistani military an excuse to sidestep this vital agenda. During his visit to Islamabad, External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna should try to review the full-range of confidence-building measures India and Pakistan have agreed to in recent years and discuss ways of taking them forward. Back channel talks will have to wait but that does not mean India should resist the resumption of ‘front channel' talks on Kashmir if the requirement of domestic optics makes them necessary for Pakistan.

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