There’s a lot in the pipeline

This was in total contrast to the atmosphere in Islamabad prior to the January 6 joint statement issued by the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan. The Islamabad summit was a culmination of a policy outlined by Atal Behari Vajpayee in his historic Srinagar speech on April 18, 2003. Thereafter, his national security advisor, Brajesh Mishra, held secret meetings with his Pakistani counterpart, Tariq Aziz, in such disparate locations as London’s Savoy hotel, Dubai and Bangkok. It was as a result of these meetings that a key sentence was inserted in the Islamabad document: “President Musharraf reassured Prime Minister Vajpayee that he will not permit any territory under Pakistan’s control to be used to support terrorism in any manner”.

Islamabad was shrouded in secrecy because matters of moment were in the works. The Kasuri visit could not possibly have been invested with the same mystique because nothing earth shaking was going to be announced for a variety of reasons: the foreign ministers were not going to upstage the Manmohan Singh-Musharraf summit due on the sidelines of the UN general assembly session later this month. Towards that end, National Security Advisor J.N. Dixit is engaged in behind-the-scenes diplomacy, which is the best way to proceed on sensitive issues like Kashmir and nuclear policy.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s attention, and that of the international community’s, is heavily focused on Afghanistan where elections are contemplated in October in the most discouraging of circumstances. Islamabad and New Delhi can also not be indifferent to the November 2 elections in the US. Musharraf, incidentally, is to make senior appointments in the army and take a final decision on shedding his military uniform. This, too, will impact on the process.

With so many distractions, it would be unrealistic to expect the Kasuri visit to make history. And yet a series of decisions were taken which will help “sustain” the Indo-Pak dialogue and keep it on positive lines. One of the decisions — underplayed in the media — has the potential of altering the terms of endearment on the subcontinent. This far reaching announcement entails the Petroleum Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar engaging his Pakistani counterpart on gas pipelines to India.

This represents a bit of a breakthrough because it is contrary to established thinking on the issue. The Indian establishment so far has pointed out Islamabad’s inconsistent logic on the issue: no serious engagement on trade unless there is tangible progress on Kashmir, but an exception can be made with regard to the pipelines, it seems. Indeed, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh did not deviate from the conventional Indian position: gas pipelines will be part of the overall economic exchange.

There is, however, a breath of fresh air in the thinking on the subject in New Delhi. This new thinking has emerged not from the professional protectors of the Indo-Pak track but from economic ministries keeping an eye on India’s energy needs in the coming years. Aiyar’s mantra was straight: what oil was to the 20th century, gas will be to the 21st. India is an island in a lake of natural gas.

In ’96 Aiyar and the BJP’s Jaswant Singh had, under the auspices of established think-tanks, held a series of meetings with like-minded Pakistani political and social activists. These meetings were held in Singapore and, later, at Jaswant Singh’s instance, at the Lake Palace Hotel in Udaipur. The group had recommended three sets of dialogues to go beyond conventional thinking on gas pipelines as part of India’s energy security: India-Iran-Pakistan, India-Pakistan-Afghanistan-Turkmenistan, India-Bangladesh-Myanmar. This bipartisan report was handed to the then foreign secretary.

Aiyar, in his new avtar as petroleum minister, has already held bilateral meeting with some of the relevant oil ministers. His will be the keynote address to the OPEC Forum in Vienna on September 17. This forum will provide him with an opportunity to discuss pipeline-related issues with the Iranian petroleum minister, among others.

That New Delhi has now decided to engage Islamabad on gas must be seen as a precursor to a series of trilateral and quadrilateral meetings in the future “if conditions are favourable”. The mere conversation on a matter of such strategic importance will bring down the temperature on all issues envisaged in the composite dialogue. A dip in Indo-Pak temperature will also facilitate studies of absolute security of such pipelines.

Parallel to the development is the US Trade and Development Agency’s significant grant to explore the feasibility of a national gas grid in India.