India-Pakistan

A reappraisal of Benazir

After the nuclear tests of 1998, Benazir confided to           Shyam Bhatia, the PPP no longer saw Indians through the narrow prism of permanent enemies

  When it comes to the future of India-Pakistan relations, the new rulers in Islamabad could do worse than take a leaf out of the book of the last 15 years of Benazir Bhutto’s life.
   Before she died the former Prime Minister had come round to the view that the only long-term bilateral solution was to create a common market — along the lines of the European Union — that would create a better life for the ordinary man or woman living in India and Pakistan.
   More than any of her predecessor presidents or prime ministers from Liaqat Ali Khan onwards, she had started articulating and defending a rational policy of peaceful engagement with India. Even her father’s promises to Indira Gandhi during the 1972 Simla summit remained largely private and hidden from the public view. And in any case those commitments were largely negated by his subsequent obsession with getting nuclear weapons for Pakistan.
   So what Benazir said on the record about India-Pakistan relations and the significance of strengthening economic ties amounts to a benchmark for the policies by which all future leaders in Islamabad are liable to be judged.
‘  If we open up people will come and visit Pakistan, our hotels will be full, more hotels will be built, more labour will get jobs’, she told me at her home in Dubai. ‘Same in your country. All the visitors who come will want to have kebab and tikka and nihari and all the shops that make all the kebab and tikka and nihari will go up. People will want to buy, they will want to spend, they will want to go to museums, they will want to sight-see. It’s the flow of money that strengthens our economy and that’s what we all need. Nepal or Bangladesh or Sri Lanka or India or Pakistan, we all need that.’
   Encouraged by this twenty-first-century approach to complex political issues, I asked Benazir to outline her approach for settling the Kashmir conflict.
   She replied, ‘It’s for negotiation and when I was Prime Minister, the Indian government had agreed to put Kashmir as an independent agenda item. We had two agenda items. One of the agenda items was Kashmir and the second agenda item was India-Pak and we said we must not let lack of progress on one issue impede progress on the other issue.
‘  The second thing … is that if we disagree over the territorial unity of Kashmir, we can still work for the social unity of Kashmir by working for safe and open borders. Because if we have safe and open borders, then people can travel, they can trade and then, ulti-mately, I feel we must ask ourselves that with a population of over a billion people and high rates of poverty amid islands of affluence, what do we do to pick ourselves out of this mess for the future? And I see the only way forward for us is to try and see what the European Union did and to try and have a kind of tariff in a common market that will enable people.’
   Of course, it was not always sweetness and reason with Benazir. Many Indians recall her inflammatory speech in 1990, when she attempted to provoke the Kashmiri masses by shouting, ‘Azadi, azadi, azadi, goli chalao’ (Freedom, freedom, freedom, fire the bullets).
   But, as she explained, that was in 1990, and much had changed since then. India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear tests had forced both her and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) to make a policy reappraisal. Elaborating, she went on, ‘After India and Pakistan went nuclear in 1998, PPP had a reappraisal and we said we don’t want to follow tit for tat with India. Just because India does something, we should not copy it. We should identify our core interests and follow our core interests, but not copy India.’
   One effect of that reappraisal was a toned-down approach to Kashmir with more emphasis on finding reasoned long-term solutions. The change meant that PPP leaders like Benazir no longer saw Indians through the narrow prism of permanent enemies.
   Many in India still do not appreciate the importance of this changed thinking. In effect, Benazir had come round to the same point of view as the United States and the Soviet Union in their time after they tested nuclear weapons following the end of World War II. Both countries realised that their nuclear arsenals ruled out any direct, face-to-face military engagement for the foreseeable future. Hence the cold war and the proxy conflicts that the two sides fought in theatres like Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan.
   Benazir also made a sharp distinction between those of her generation who were born after Partition and some of the older generation who still had bitter memories of that tragic episode. ‘I have met people who are very bitter about India and I am sure you have similar on your side who have witnessed massacres’, she told me. ‘There was one particular lawyer I remember in Lahore whose father was massacred in front of him and he barely escaped with his own life. People who witnessed massacres, it’s very difficult for them to let go.
‘  But, generally speaking, those who did not witness massacres, they all want to talk about their homes in India which they left — and even Indians do the same. I met (former Prime Minister) Mr I.K. Gujral and he told me he had been in Jhelum, his whole life about Jhelum. I have met (former Deputy Prime Minister) Mr (L.K.) Advani and he told me about Karachi and Hyderabad.’
   Asked if it was Hindus in particular who were disliked in Pakistan, or Indians in general, Benazir replied, ‘Well, it changes from times of tension to times of less tension. When there is tension and troops at the borders, then people hate anyone who is Indian, irrespective of whether they are Muslim or Hindu. They say, They want to attack us and kill us, they want to destroy us and our country.
‘  But when there is no tension, people really welcome Indians. I mean Indian films are very popular in Pakistan. Indian goods are smuggled across Pakistan all the time, people are desperate to get Indian visas and travel to India to go and visit their families, and go and see the Taj Mahal and Mughal heritage of those days. And overseas, in America I must have travelled to all the states where Indians and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis see themselves as South Asians. They feel their interests are the same. They work together, they socialise together, there is no   hatred at all.
  ‘You leave it to the people and they all want to be friends. Sometimes I think that your country and my country, our militaries need a war so that they can go on buying weapons. I don’t know. But as far as the people level is concerned, there is a lot of love and affection.’


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