India: Beyond the Rhetoric


Written by Chris Cork • Region • May 2008

Formal diplomacy will continue under the new Pakistan government in the ongoing attempts to repair old wounds with India; but diplomacy operates at more than one level, writes Chris Cork

There can be few images that better illustrate the nature of the relationship between Pakistan and India than the sight of coolies, one team in each country, unloading goods from wagons on one side and passing them to coolies on the other for forward transport. This is a trading relationship conducted in the Stone Age, not in 2008, and it is a tragedy for both nations whose respective poverty-stricken populations would derive substantial benefit from a relaxation of trading restrictions between the two

President Musharraf, speaking on 13th April during his visit to China talked of the warming of bilateral relations with India under his stewardship, and it is certainly true that having gone to the nuclear brink the two nations have settled back into a sullen quiescence. Peace has not broken out but neither has war, and both sides still regard one-another as natural enemies, their core areas of shared dispute as far from resolution as ever. Also shared are a range of problems that are similar for both, the differences being in scale rather than substance. Despite having created a global image of itself as an emerging regional superpower with a thrusting economy, India is still a desperately poor country, with many of its urban and rural poor as impoverished as their neighbours over the border. Both nations face power and water shortages in the here and now that are going to get worse in the short term, and food insecurity is eating away at the social glue which holds societies together.

The process of peacemaking is multi-faceted, a ganglia of interlocking conundrums that are rarely all solved at the same time or in the same way – and once the peace is made there is the equally difficult task of implementing a process that may or may not have the wholehearted support of the peoples governed by the politicians and diplomats who brokered it. In the Labyrinthine depths of the peacemaking process currently in train with India it will be an accretion of events large and small that eventually produces the pearl of peace.

Risk-taking is an essential part of the peace process, the proverbial leap in the dark. A new government in Pakistan is perhaps opening up new opportunities for bilateral exchanges of the non-explosive variety – making a small jump into the unknown and both the leaders of the principal political parties of the coalition government have taken such a jump. Asif Ali Zardari has suggested (but later claimed to have been quoted out of context) that the Kashmir issue be put on the back burner for a while, perhaps for a succeeding generation to resolve. Considering the centrality of this issue this was perhaps a risk and a jump too far by a man little-learned in the heavily-mined trackways of geopolitics. Somewhat more credibly Nawaz Sharif has advanced the notion that Pakistan should unilaterally allow visa-free entry to Indian nationals and in doing so leverage reciprocity over time – a near-future suggestion that merits consideration.

This is indeed a mould-breaking proposition and it is also a considerable risk at several levels. There will inevitably be those who will say that Pakistan is merely opening its door to terrorists and the Indian security services, giving them leave to roam at will. Others will suggest that once again it is Pakistan that has taken the initiative and made a constructive offer, with as yet no hint of a similar offer from the other side of the border. Both may be true – and were India to make a similar unilateral proposal we can be sure that identical arguments would be heard there.

No matter who makes the move the fact is that unless a move is made the logjam will remain unbroken and nothing will change. People-to-people contact is a hugely important element within the wider brokerage of peace between India and Pakistan. Enabling that contact beyond the narrow confines of divided families and limited business contacts embroiders the corner of the Cloth of Peace that has recently seen Indian films shown in Pakistan and even more recently, vice-versa. The visa-free movement of Indians into Pakistan will doubtless alarm some and there are clear objective risks attached, but it is also an opportunity to build and sustain those vital people-to-people contacts that – away from the rarefied stratosphere of formal diplomacy – will hopefully be one of the foundation stones of amity between the fractious neighbours.

Formal diplomacy comes in many guises, most of them arcane and conservative, and the last thing that India or Pakistan would wish is for diplomacy to have ‘given’ anything to the advantage of the other. Every shift in the relationship is carefully calibrated and balanced with proportionality, but alongside the glacial slowness of the formal processes there is a steady stream of diplomatic activity of a less formal nature – which some may not even recognise as diplomacy – and is more reflective of the shared culture and needs of both countries.

The populist media everywhere needs to find a tag-line to describe or encapsulate the story of the day, and informal diplomacy is an area rich in journalistic shorthand – and thus was born ‘ping-pong diplomacy’ in the Nixon years and more recently and locally ‘cricket diplomacy’ (a strategy now looking a little threadbare).

Today, we have ‘Basmati diplomacy’ having a stab at bridge-building, this at a time when the World Bank is warning of global food shortages – starkly evidenced by the riots in Haiti in early April. We live in a world of diminishing resources and the world can no longer feed itself. ‘Food diplomacy’ is an interesting concept, and one that in the longer term may prove to be more durable than the artificially-coloured constructs of ping-pong and cricket diplomacy.

The vast plain of the Punjab, breadbasket of a pre-partition India and - post 1947 - India and Pakistan, is the focus of the latest bilateral exchange of informalities. A delegation of farmers, agrarians and agricultural experts from Pakistan has recently been urging both governments to open up the borders for trade and visa relaxations. In the last week of March 2008 a delegation of the Farmers association of Pakistan led by a former Punjab minister for food went to India to participate in the workshop ‘Total agriculture between India and Pakistan – connecting farmers through knowledge-sharing on agriculture’ – an event which would have benefited from a snappier title!

The Pakistan Punjab provides up to 80% of the nation’s wheat, rice, sugarcane and cotton, and the Indian Punjab about 60% of that country’s food needs. Indian farmers as a general rule are a little more prosperous – which does not prevent them from having the highest suicide-rate of any occupational grouping on the subcontinent – and have the edge over their counterparts because their government is more generous in its allowances to them and invests more heavily in agriculture generally.

Services and goods are available to the Indian farmer at lower rates and most farmers get free electricity – a major consideration particularly when considering the costs of pumped water for irrigation. Pakistani farmers, labouring under the burden of endless power-cuts would be glad of any electricity, free or otherwise.

The two groups have similar challenges in their relationships with the Centre – royalties on agricultural products sold to the government and the farmers share of the divisible pool, the relative lack of importance they are accorded and reliance by both countries on the free market economy that has seen an influx of multinationals – often to the detriment of the small independent farmer. Clearly, those at the clumsily named workshop had much of common interest to talk about. Whether ‘food diplomacy’ will do anything other than highlight the problems of a sector that is suffering in both countries is a moot point, but the fact that the exchange took place at all is significant in that the food producers of both countries have ‘opened channels’ down which all manner of things might flow. Might flow if the visa regime was relaxed as suggested, might flow if there was an increase in cross-border trade on the basis of reciprocity – if India exports $500 million of goods to Pakistan then Pakistan exports goods of similar value to India, maintaining the diplomatic balance – to the mutual benefit of both.

Building peace is not just about having an absence of war, it as much about the post-conflict reconstructive work that gets done by farmers and tourists and businessmen with a product to sell. For the new government of Pakistan there is to be a continuation of formal diplomatic processes with little expectation of huge shifts in the offing; but underneath the gravitas of formal diplomacy there is the person-to-person contact between those ordinary people going about their daily business that may well be the cement that eventually holds peace together.