PROLOGUE

On January 16, 2023, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif sat down with the Dubai-based television channel, Al Arabiya and, among other issues, spoke about Pakistan’s relations with India. Sharif stated, “It is up to us to live peacefully and make progress or quarrel with each other and waste time and resources…My message to…Prime Minister Narendra Modi is that let us sit down…and have serious and sincere talks to resolve our burning issues like Kashmir.” Sharif also said the United Arab Emirates (UAE) could play an important role in facilitating the resumption of dialogue between India and Pakistan.

In a pro forma response, India’s Ministry of External Affairs’ spokesperson, Arindam Bagchi said, “We [India] have said that we have always wanted normal neighbourly relations with Pakistan. But there should be a conducive atmosphere which does not have terror, hostility or violence.”

Much has happened since January 2023. Pakistan’s economy has continued to decline and the country is simmering with political discontent. The February 8 election, widely considered to be rigged at both system and operational levels, has only worsened the situation. The overt and covert repression might have quietened down the full expression of dissent but it continues to fester, affecting the body politic, and will likely recrudesce.

India has gone through an election too, which saw the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerge victorious, albeit without securing a clear majority on its own. After 10 years, India now has a coalition government, but the BJP remains the predominant driver of that coalition. This essentially means that while Modi, now in his third term as prime minister, might not be able to strong-arm the opposition internally as he is used to, his coalition will go along with his foreign and security policies. In other words, we are unlikely to see much change on that front.

The cutting edge of that wedge is India’s Pakistan policy: stall talks, hurt Pakistan diplomatically and by sponsoring terrorism at the sub-conventional level, while continuing to accuse Pakistan of “terrorism” and speak of a conducive atmosphere as a precondition for any talks.

No one actually disputes that talking would be better than hostile actions between Pakistan and India or that greater trade would not be beneficial to the two countries. But can such talks and greater trade take place in the context of current Pakistan-India relations? And would they solve their ongoing bilateral issues? Ejaz Haider uses international relations theory to challenge the common narrative…

The question then is, to quote the headline from a recent op-ed by Engr Khurram Dastgir-Khan, “What to do with India?” The question implies that Pakistan has to do something, given not just the physical fact of India’s presence in the east but also because India has continued to harm Pakistan at multiple levels.

Khan is a Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) heavyweight and has run commerce, defence and foreign ministries. He is not an outsider taking an outside-in view, but has been an inside player. It is instructive when he says that as a first step Pakistan should “stop offering talks to India, which the present government [led by his party] has inadvisably done more than once.” He was referring to recent statements by the prime minister and the foreign minister.

Another former PML-N leader and twice Pakistan’s finance minister, Dr Miftah Ismail, argues that Pakistan should keep every other issue/dispute on the back-burner and trade with India. When interviewed for a Dawn article, Dr Ismail said, “All trade is beneficial, and given the countries’ proximity, it is beneficial to both countries. China and Taiwan have a dispute, but their trade is booming. India and China have a dispute, but their trade is flourishing. China and India have skirmishes at the border but trade with one another.”

Pakistan-India relations can be discussed and debated from a number of perspectives. Here, I will focus on just two: talking to India and trading with it.

PURITY VERSUS CONTEXT

Saying that X must talk to Y because talking is better than fighting is unlikely to beget much disagreement because talking is generally regarded as a better option. In its purity the statement makes eminent sense. But then life happens and life is all about context.

Take, for instance, the above statement: X must talk to Y means X isn’t talking to Y. But unless it can be proved that X isn’t talking to Y despite Y wanting to talk to X, one has to delve deeper into X’s reasons for not talking to Y.

The problem is a chicken and egg one. Trade requires better relations and better relations require trade, or at least for relations to reach a point where other disputes cannot derail trade. Clearly, reaching that point requires a bilateral consensus. The liberals argue that all will be well when Pakistan and India resume full trade but don’t know how to get the two sides there.

In the event that we figure out that X is not talking to Y because Y wants to cut X loose, we have moved the problem from the purity of the desirability of talking to the context of why talks are not happening — or what the cost for X would be to appeal to Y. Purity is the state of simple consciousness; context is the state of self-consciousness.

This is a deliberately simple exercise in problematising purity. I have not used any........

© Dawn (Magazines)