Too much of a good thing?

It’d be unfair to ignore Laloo Prasad Yadav’s local folk hero status when he visited Pakistan with a delegation of MPs. And now that the Monabao-Khokrapar rail link is to be activated by the end of the year, who knows, he may be on the other side to watch the rail track progress.

Communists Harkishen Singh Surjeet and A.B. Bardhan’s recent visit to Islamabad completed the comprehensive nature of the political engagement.

I have met so many people who remember with exceptional warmth the recent visit to New Delhi and Aligarh by President Musharraf’s family.

The two cricket teams continue to win hearts and minds on the subcontinent. By the time Musharraf turns up for the final ODI, the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus route will, hopefully, have smoothed itself out. The attack on the Srinagar tourist centre has, paradoxically, brought India and Pakistan closer together on an anti-terrorist plank. This act of terrorism notwithstanding, New Delhi will have to demonstrate its willingness to reduce its military visibility, from the urban centres to begin with.

When there is too much of a good thing, Josh once wrote, we must ponder if it will last. The dismal state of Indo-Pak relations over the past 25 years was rooted in the global and regional situation which Zia-Ul-Haq sought to exploit by building up an anti-India plank in perpetuity. The Shah had been ousted Iran, and Riyadh and Tehran became competing centres in the Islamic world. The siege of the American embassy in Tehran and Riyadh’s adversarial view of the Islamic revolution confirmed the US-Riyadh antipathy to Tehran.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan helped consolidate the US-Pak equation, bringing the ISI to stoke a Wahhabi Islam which would target the Soviets as well as Iran. After Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the spare militant talent reached Kashmir, Eqypt, Algeria, Sudan. Began the insurgency in Kashmir.

The anti-India line got etched in stone as Pakistan’s national self definition: we are because we could not/cannot live in harmony with them.

Kashmir, admittedly an unresolved issue from the start, became an essential plank of Pakistan’s anti-India policy. One hostility bred another. Some political interests in India found an adversarial equation with Pakistan useful to give Indian nationalism a religious twist.

Indian secularism stood its ground despite major setbacks as during the fall of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and Gujarat riots in 2002. Both events were helped by an atmosphere to which negative Indo-Pak chemistry certainly contributed. How else would you explain Modi’s “Mian Musharraf” taunt?

Indian secularism protected, among a billion others, the world’s second largest Muslim population. The theocratic state, on the other hand, which stood in implacable opposition to the secular state, faced one very awkward problem. The two countries had 150 million Muslims each. If one group was evolving in a secular ethos as part of India’s composite culture, the other had to be separated by doses of triple distilled Islam, disengaging it culturally from the subcontinent. The Taliban (groomed by the ISI), export of militancy into J&K tied in with this ultra-Islamic tilt. The US found some of it useful during the cold war. Later the drift towards Islamic militancy was tolerated as it was on the other side of the globe.

Then two events changed the world and the region. September 11, 2001 brought the Americans into Afghanistan, incorporating Pakistan into a war against terrorism. Kashmir infiltrations were tolerated for a period to enable Musharraf to control the abruptly altered domestic scene.

The Iraq war caused India to recast its Pakistan policy. True, the swiftness with which Musharraf had adjusted to the new realities in the wake of 9/11 would, over a period of time, have forced New Delhi to contemplate Pakistan differently. But what precipitated the change in New Delhi was Iraq.

Remember, Saddam’s statue was pulled down in Baghdad on April 9, 2003. On April 18 Atal Bihari Vajpayee made his peace overture in Srinagar.

If the atmosphere of peace and harmony in the subcontinent is to be made permanent, Manmohan Singh and Pervez Musharraf must now work towards real celebrations in Kashmir, way beyond the bus journey, step by measured step, within the framework of the composite dialogue, preparing public opinion in India, Pakistan and Kashmir for adjustments, placing the residual militants into ever narrowing cordons of isolation.