Suhasini Haidar: Year of broken promises, missed opportunities

India hosted the leaders of all five permanent members of UN Security Council in 2010, but its relations with Pakistan remain fraught with mistrust

India hosted the leaders of all five permanent members of the UN Security Council in 2010, but its relations with Pakistan are as fraught with mistrust as ever

YouTube describes it as the world’s most ridiculous border ceremony. And that’s putting it politely, as anyone who has watched the Wagah flag-lowering ceremony between India and Pakistan would testify. Yet, evening after evening, Indian and Pakistani rangers with plumed turbans take great pride in strutting and goose-stepping, as they seal theirs borders. The rangers’ “carefully choreographed contempt” (BBC’s description) excites crowds to more overt, fist-pumping aggression against each other.

The exercise does nothing to help ties between the two countries, and impacts the knees of the soldiers enacting it even more negatively. In July 2010, after rangers on both sides complained of severe knee injuries, Indian and Pakistani authorities decided to tone down the ceremony. But a few months later, as relations between New Delhi and Islamabad froze again, the director-general of the Punjab Rangers in Pakistan reversed the decision, issuing a stiff note saying the aggressive boot-stomping would remain.

Unfortunately, failing to seize the chance to civilise the Wagah ceremony is only one of a series of missed opportunities for India and Pakistan in the past year. In fact, to paraphrase the legendary Abba Eban, the governments of both countries have not missed any opportunity to miss an opportunity in 2010.

It was a year that began with some hope. The ‘Aman ki Asha’ campaign, along with several other track-3 efforts, began in January to look at ways in which the two countries could restore the process blown apart by the Mumbai attacks. In February, the foreign secretaries met in Delhi; by April the Prime Ministers met in Thimphu with a view to restarting the dialogue process by July, after the Home Ministers and the Foreign Ministers of both sides would meet.

The promise of Thimphu in April however lay shattered by Islamabad in July. After the foreign ministers meeting failed, the two sides have had little formal contact — in short, the year’s first half’s hopes were belied by the hopelessness of the second half. Now, as the two sides begin to tentatively restart backchannel negotiations, with the prospect of New Delhi hosting Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi in the next few months, it is important to look at all the broken promises that led to such an impasse.

To begin with, India steadily refused to return to the composite dialogue process or any form of it. Let’s remember that Prime Ministers Singh and Gilani met on the sidelines of the SAARC summit not to discuss the dossiers of evidence on 26/11, but to discuss a process that would lead them back to dialogue. The plan in April 2010 was very clearly to allow the foreign secretaries, home secretaries and home ministers to engage in June on issues surrounding Pakistan’s inaction on 26/11 and lead up to the foreign ministers’ meeting in July, marking a resumption of talks between the two countries.

Despite very constructive and promising meetings in June, why did the foreign ministers fail in July? The Indian decision against resuming the composite dialogue was only one reason. The other, far more than the belligerence of Foreign Minister Qureshi’s tone, was Pakistan's failure to keep its promises on the 26/11 investigation. Those promises were made to Home Minister P Chidambaram in Islamabad, and repeated by Qureshi and Interior Minister Rehman Malik to Indian channels: that Pakistan would hand over voice samples of the 26/11 accused, it would try prosecuting LeT founder Hafiz Saeed, and it would investigate the case against ISI operatives who according to David Headley, planned 26/11. Even a basic promise to speed up the trial in Rawalpindi hasn’t been followed through.

Indian officials can claim some of the credit for that delay, first suggesting that Pakistan send a judicial commission to take Ajmal Kasab’s testimony here, then saying an Indian team should go to Pakistan first, to interrogate the men being held there. Even in a perfect world, such broken promises would cause procedural delays; in the far from perfect India-Pakistan context, they have brought the entire peace process to a halt, and led to a hardening of positions. The lesson to be learnt ahead of the next round of engagement between the two is simple: don’t promise what you can’t or won’t deliver.

Eventually, the state of ties reportedly led Prime Minister Singh to tell President Obama in November that India is “giving up” on talks with Pakistan; that despite Singh’s own personal best efforts (efforts Obama described as “relentless”), Pakistan had not budged on 26/11, the issue still searing the Indian psyche. More than that, it is back to raising Kashmir at all international fora, while inside Pakistan, the LeT and Hafiz Saeed hold public rallies.

India can be justifiably proud of having spent the year hosting the world’s leaders, including every member of the Security Council P-5, and it will be at the high table with them as well. It made strides in ties with many neighbours, extending billion dollar credit lines to Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. But in its most complicated relationship, the two governments only succeeded in tangling the lines further. Consequences like Pakistan’s delay in granting visas to Indian train drivers, or India’s delay in certifying Pakistani cement, blocking trade, and even allowing tonnes of imported onions to rot, only underscore that.

If there is any reason to hope it is that despite it all, the two sides continue to issue visas to each other’s citizens; flights, trains and buses still operate, albeit frequently empty, and neither side has yet called the dialogue process off. Faced with the reality of having hit rock-bottom, the next steps in the India-Pakistan dialogue process in 2011 can only be baby-steps forward. A start maybe to make good on the promise to the rangers guarding the Wagah-Attari checkpost — that they may one day rest their battered knees and end the day by lowering the flag and sharing a well-earned cup of tea together.

The author is deputy foreign editor at CNN-IBN