Now that the April Foreign Policy euphoria is over, the party poopers are out with full force. The question is again being asked: can we trust General Musharraf? It is as if we are remembering the advice Harry Potter gets, “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you cannot be sure where it keeps its brain.” The general may declare that he comes with a changed heart, but what is he really thinking? How can Pakistan ever change? For Musharraf, isn’t diplomacy really war by other means, a lull in the proceedings where you put on a charm offensive so that you can rethink your strategy? Although these are legitimate questions, they are also ill posed ones.Raising the question of trust makes it sound like we have actually given something away. But the plain fact of the matter is that we have not made any concessions at all. Our position on territorial adjustments, on Kashmir, on the priority of CBMs, etc remains the same. For the moment at any rate, Pakistan has had to do more adjusting than we have. Second, the question of trust is raised as if the peace process is incompatible with a tough line on security. Kargil did not happen because we trusted Pakistan. Kargil happened because we were sleeping on the watch. This is an important distinction. There is nothing in the positions of those who are pushing for better relations, that entails letting your guard down on security. Military security, both internal and external, is important for the peace process. The more untoward incidents there are, by way of incursions or terrorist attacks, the more difficult the peace process will be. So the peace process requires more vigilant security, not less.But the argument from trust is a tricky one. I try to imagine what a Pakistani equivalent of our Arun Shourie, a smart dedicated hawk, might construct as a narrative about India. (Parenthetically, if Arun Shourie is to be believed, most of Pakistan’s power structure consists of people to whom at least the last two of the three adjectives apply.) They would spin the following argument. “India is a huge power; it has a latent constituency for anti-Muslim sentiment that occasionally even comes to power. It has consistently nurtured a nuclear programme and tested before we did. It has the power to seriously mess up our water supply and has some hawks advocating that policy. It actively participated in the dismembering of our nation in 1971. And goodness, it has now even acquired a significant air force base in Tajikistan, designed to encircle us. How can we ever trust them?”To this we reply, not unjustifiably, that we are proud of our democratic record, that we did not want to dismember Pakistan but wanted to prevent genocide, that we always act in self defence only, that our moral claims on Kashmir are impeccable, that we have never used low-level insurgencies the way Pakistan has and so forth. All this happens to be true.But it would be otiose not to acknowledge that it is possible, even for half reasonable people, to construct a narrative that gives them reason to distrust India. The point is that questions of trust cannot be answered entirely empirically. We bring our prejudgments and biases to this question. To be provocative, it can be argued that a lot of so called hawkishness in any foreign policy discussion is simply a product of intellectual risk averseness. If you are a hawk, you can never be wrong, because nothing can disprove your position. On the other hand, those who think there is some room for manoeuvre do run the risk of possibly being proved wrong. Some hawkishness, contrary to appearances, is about a lack of a certain kind of courage; a refusal to even try and think your way out of a vicious trust trap. Third, the question of trust is also beside the point in another way. The real question is whether the incentives on the ground and the balance of capabilities are such that we have reason to think that we can do some business. And it is there that those who think that nothing has changed are wrong. Support for Pakistan inside Kashmir is at its lowest. The Americans will cut Pakistan a lot of slack, but their fundamental perceptions about terrorism have changed. The extent of militant Islam in Pakistan is always difficult to gauge, but there are reasons to think that its influence is exaggerated. As a recent World Bank paper by Jishnu Das shows with credible data, madarsas still account for less than 1 per cent of school enrollment in Pakistan. This is not to deny that Pakistan has the capacity for serious cross border mischief, but it is far from being a society that will go lock, stock and barrel over to the mullahs. If anything, greater Islamisation will produce more serious threats within Pakistan and intensify their own internal conflicts. And civil society trends seem to be shifting as well. The difficulty with many of our so called realists is that they do not think about long term changes, they are imprisoned by a short term logic.Given our histories, it will be too much to expect a sudden turnaround in ideological positions. At the moment it is important to take small steps, significant enough to keep both sides interested. The most difficult question we are going to face is how to promote peace with honour. We don’t owe Pakistan any favours. But we will be doing ourselves a favour by giving them some elbow room to not come out feeling totally vanquished. This is a moment where we also need to send some credible signals about our intentions, at least to those in Pakistan who, like most of us, become hawks under the slightest weight of uncertainty. None of this entails any compromising on our military security or vigilance or our core principles. There is no need to damn the peace process by associating with it an unconcern for security, just as it would be foolish to conclude that toughness by itself entails security. Of course you will be deceived if you trust too much. But if you don’t ever trust, you will be condemned to live in torment.
