Seeking Change in India-Pakistan Relations

The more things change, the more they stay the same. So the saying goes, and it certainly appears to hold true when discussing attempts at diplomatic rapprochement between South Asia’s two largest states and nuclear-armed rivals, India and Pakistan. After scant progress in their seemingly perpetually tense bilateral relationship in 2015, the two sides managed to end the year on a positive note.

On December 25, 2015 – Christmas day – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, instead of flying straight to New Delhi after his state visit to Afghanistan, decided to stop over in Lahore, Pakistan. In Lahore, Modi embraced his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, and the two leaders walked hand-in-hand, grinning effusively. For even the most seasoned observers of diplomatic affairs in the subcontinent, the symbolism was unmistakably positive. In India, Pakistan, and around the world, analysts wondered if this heralded a paradigm shift in South Asia.

The optimism was short-lived. Not long thereafter, the house of cards came tumbling down when militants with the long-dormant Pakistani terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed unleashed an assault against an Indian Air Force Base in northern Punjab, at Pathankot. The Pathankot assault began just 48 hours into the new year, amid talk that the foreign ministries of both India and Pakistan were finalizing details for a foreign secretary-level meet. Then militants staged attacks in the vicinity of India’s consulates in the Afghan cities of Mazar-e-Sharif and Jalalabad – all before the dust could settle at Pathankot. In the end, both India and Pakistan agreed to postpone the ministerial talks, which had been scheduled for January 15.

The Pathankot attacks put India and Pakistan in a bind. Even before the attackers were confirmed by the Indian intelligence agency to have been affiliated with Jaish-e-Mohammed and had traversed the India-Pakistan border to attack the airbase, numerous analysts speculated that Pakistan-based spoilers were at work, looking to scuttle any chance at peace between the two neighboring states. Indeed, in India, many commentators suggested that the wily hand of the Pakistani military and, in particular, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate were behind the events at Pathankot; if the attackers had not been directly instructed to carry out the attack, then they had at least been trained, equipped and encouraged by elements within the Pakistani military-intelligence community.

Then, something somewhat surprising happened. According to varying reports, Pakistan, it turned out, had arrested several Jaish-e-Mohammed operatives, carried out raids against schools run by the terror outfit, and taken the group’s leader, Masood Azhar, into custody. That last bit of news appeared too good to be true initially. Could it be that the Pakistani state had taken real action against a terror leader whose organization is part of the military-intelligence community’s non-state actor toolkit against India? Historically, the locus of control over Pakistan’s foreign and security policy lay in Rawalpindi, the site of the Pakistani military’s general headquarters. The civilians in Islamabad exercised authority only with the consent of the military rather than the other way around. Optimists hoped that the news of Azhar’s arrest was true; ultimately, though, everything was thrown back into flux.

The Pakistan foreign office wouldn’t confirm that he’d been arrested, and Indian intelligence couldn’t confirm it either (and they’d been in touch with Pakistani authorities in the wake of Pathankot). At best, some reports suggested Azhar had been taken into protective custody by Pakistani authorities. As of this writing, the saga remains unresolved, but the latest from Indian agencies is that Azhar was never detained by Pakistani authorities at all.

Recounting the events since December 25 here is useful for a range of reasons, not least to emphasize the relevance of the epigram at the onset of this article. In many ways, we’ve seen this movie before. In 1999, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, also of Modi’s center-right Bharatiya Janata Party, extended a grand gesture toward Pakistan – he rode a bus from Delhi to Lahore.

At the time, there was an effusion of optimism about what the gesture foreshadowed for relations. Unfortunately, later that year, the Kargil War broke out – the first post-Cold War conventional conflict between two nuclear-armed countries. Similarly echoing the dynamics at work after Pathankot, Jaish-e-Mohammad’s spectacular attack on the Indian parliament in 2002 took place after the historic Agra summit between Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Vajpayee.

The current “is he, isn’t he” discourse surrounding Masood Azhar’s arrest is also oddly reminiscent of Pakistani vacillation on arresting Hafez Saeed, the mastermind behind the devastating November 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai that killed more than 160. Saeed, who leads Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the group’s political front, was placed under house arrest in December 2008. Ten months later, the Lahore High Court threw out all charges against Saeed and he walked free.

Saeed’s freedom remains a major source of consternation for India, which sees Pakistan’s refusal to take action against him and his confederates, including Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, as a sign that Islamabad simply isn’t willing to stand up to the terror groups that seek to strike across the border into India and surreptitiously ruin any chance for sustained political dialogue between the two sides. The optimism that abounded after reports of Azhar’s arrest in the wake of Pathankot has largely now been tempered by expectations that at best, Azhar will receive treatment similar to Saeed in 2008 and, at worst, will remain free. When New Delhi and Islamabad resolved to postpone talks, Azhar’s status remained ambiguous.

What should be apparent from the above chronology is that the incidence of terror attacks in India emanating from Pakistan and New Delhi’s willingness to talk to Pakistan are linked. The timing of these many provocations, from Kargil to Pathankot, is far from coincidental. It captures the Pakistani military establishment’s hostility to the prospect of peace with India without victory over India. For an institution which has its raison d’être inextricably linked to the prospect of perpetual contest with India – a contest that extends far beyond the contentious issue of the fate of Kashmir as a territory – the prospect of dialogue is anathema.

The fallout of Pathankot has also proved faulty the assumption that the appointment of Lieutenant General Nasir Khan Janjua as Pakistan’s National Security Adviser in October 2015 would somehow bridge the interests of the military and the civilian government. There are few other indicators that Pakistan’s military and civilian government have come around to a unified approach on the India issue. Thus, despite the grins and embraces in Lahore and despite the reports of state action against Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists, relations between Pakistan and India appear poised to endure through 2016 as usual.

It remains to be seen if this negative momentum will carry through the remainder of the year, but change in the basic dynamic of the bilateral does not appear likely for now. India will likely press on with talks, lest Modi’s overture in Lahore be seen back home as a naive gesture instead of bold one. In Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif may have to work overtime to attest his bona fide interest in comprehensive peace talks despite a recalcitrant military. If recent history is any guide, he will be unlikely to succeed.