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| Indo-Pak Dialogue - I | | Nothing to emerge out of Thimpu talks | | RUSTAM
EARLY TIMES REPORT
JAMMU, Feb 6: Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao and her Pakistani counterpart Salman Bashir today would meet at the Bhutanese capital Thimpu. The stated objective is to prepare ground for a meeting between Indian Foreign Minister S M Krishna and his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmud Qureshi so that the stalled composite dialogue is resumed and all outstanding issues between India and Pakistan, including the so-called Kashmir issue, resolved in order to forge a lasting peace in South Asia. The dialogue process came to a standstill in the wake of the deadly Mumbai terrorist attacks in November 2008, notwithstanding the fact that attempts were made at Sharm-el-Sheikh, Islamabad and Thimpu to restart the dialogue process, but yielding no tangible results. Everything happened on expected lines.
Earlier, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had also sought to cultivate Pakistani President and General Pervez Musharraf at Hawana by making common cause with the latter and declaring that Pakistan, like India, was also a victim of terrorism and had expressed the view that he was prepared to go an extra mile in order to resolve the pending issues. All these UPA-led Government's initiatives had evoked very sharp reaction in India. So much so that the main opposition party, the BJP, had accused the UPA-Government of bartering the country's paramount interests in order to purchase peace. The UPA Government found it extremely difficult to defend itself.
It is not a secret that Pakistan wants India to accept at least three demands - demilitarization of the state, resolution of the Kashmir issue as per the wishes of Islamabad and people of Kashmir and implementation of the 1960 Indus Water Treaty in a manner that caters to the water needs of Pakistan to the maximum possible extent. Pakistan's very existence depends upon the Indian waters, especially the Indus, Chenab and Jhelum waters. "Pakistan is", in the words of none other Jama-at-ud-Dawa chief and mastermind of the Mumbai terrorist attacks Hafiz Saeed, "rightly perturbed about the depleting water resources of the country, and it is most important it realizes that all the deposits of water are in Indian Kashmir. The only way by which economic prosperity of Pakistan can be guaranteed and its farms can be prevented from getting barren is to increase its efforts in wresting control of India-occupied-Kashmir. Only if Kashmir is freed from Indian control, can Pakistan's economic interests be safeguarded." In other words, Pakistan's main focus is the state waters.
Pakistan also wants New Delhi to grant a sort of self-governance as a first step. It believes such a development would ultimately lead to the separation of Jammu and Kashmir from India and its merger with Pakistan. Pakistan considers Jammu and Kashmir as part of unfinished agenda of partition and wants to annex it on the ground that the state is a Muslim-majority area, notwithstanding the fact that Jammu and Kashmir State being a princely state was out of the purview of the partition plan.
Pakistan made three attempts in 1947-1948, 1965 and 1971 to annex Kashmir, but suffered humiliating defeats at the hands of the Indian Army. The Kashmiri Muslims played an important role in 1947-1948 and 1965 and helped the Indian Army take on and defeat the Pakistani intruders, invaders and butchers. The 1971 saw Pakistan splitting into two countries and Bangladesh came into being as an independent and sovereign country, thus rendering the religious factor to be a meaningless sham or not a binding factor and establishing that economic factor and the urge for self-respect and self-governance were more important than anything else. The 1971 war between the two countries also witnessed over 90,000 Pakistani defeated soldiers and Commanders surrendering and laying down their arms before the victorious Indian Army. It is, however, a different story that the Government of Indian converted that spectacular victory on the battlefield into a humiliating defeat at the negotiating table at Shimla in 1972. The Government of India for the first time made Pakistan a party to the s-called Kashmir dispute under the controversial Shimla Agreement. The defeated Zulfikar Ali Bhutto turned the tables and got everything that he wanted after misleading and hoodwinking the ambivalent Indian leadership. But this was not the first time that India had converted victory in the battlefield into a diplomatic defeat. It had happened in 1948 and it had also happened in 1965. (To be continued) |
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