Reflections | Can South Asia Prosper With India-Pak Détente? | Sunanda K. Datta-Ray

If anything, the Indian ruling coalition’s landslide victory in the Bihar Assembly election increases its responsibility for seriously attempting to mend fences with Pakistan. The possible resumption of military rule there, facilitated by its recent 27th Constitution Amendment, has nothing to do with us. But South Asia’s substantial Muslim population may interpret a powerful reiteration of the BJP’s mandate as a Hindutva vote that will again allow the Jammu and Kashmir question to poison the subcontinent’s negotiating space.

Time was when Indians regretted that Pakistan’s governmental system encouraged cynical politicians to woo some 129 million voters with the exaggerated propaganda with which we are sadly all too familiar in what boasts of being the world’s largest democracy. It was suggested that Pakistanis might be more amenable to rational argument if some form of authoritarianism limited the free-for-all of democratic dissent. But no one imagined on October 7, 1958, when the late Iskander Ali Mirza seized power in Pakistan by abrogating the Constitution and declaring martial law, that the military had come to stay. The gag that ministers come and go but Pakistan’s Army is always in power hadn’t yet been coined. Instead, the wits called the first dictator “Iskandar the First”, remembering his notorious ancestor, Mir Jafar, who was rewarded with the label for betraying Bengal’s last independent nawab, Siraj ud-Daulah.

Not that Mirza lasted long. His Chief Martial Law Administrator, Gen. Ayub Khan, gave him his marching orders just three weeks later. Field Marshal Asim Munir is the latest in that dynasty of dictators, although the Prime Minister and the President still hold their titular positions.

Viewing the larger picture, Iskandar Mirza may not have erred wildly when he said that a country with only 15 per cent literacy could not afford democracy. Pakistan’s Chief Justice invoked the doctrine of necessity to legitimise the coup. Ayub Khan reasoned that formal democracy was redundant since democracy was inherent in Islam. Asked on Singapore TV in 1997 why democracy had survived in India but not across the border, Pakistan’s high commissioner produced the ingenious explanation that the Pakistani military felt aggrieved because India had withheld vital military assets when the country was partitioned in 1947.

Pakistan is generally considered militarily less powerful than India, as indicated by rankings like the Global Firepower Index 2025, which places Pakistan at 12th and India at 4th position. Pakistan’s Gross Domestic Product is one-eighth that of India; it has one-seventh the population and one-fifth the area.

Pakistan’s armed forces are only between two-and-a-half to three times smaller than India’s, having been built up at the expense of social welfare. While India has sustained parliamentary democracy through regular elections at several levels -- from village council to Parliament -- Pakistan had known three prolonged spells of military rule before Gen. Pervez Musharraf seized power on October 12, 1999, overthrowing the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, the last dictator, so often reneged on promises to hold elections that Pakistanis joked that his CMLA designation denoted “Cancel My Last Announcement”.

The idee fixe of Kashmir is probably the strongest national glue today in a country that suffers from several secessionist pulls. The special relationship with America that President Donald Trump seems bent on reviving, and the flow of American aid and arms (direct and through China), are bound to encourage delusions of equality with India in spite of a bankrupt exchequer, disintegrating political institutions and demographic discord. Shorn of external support, Pakistan would not be of much more consequence than “Upper Volta with rockets”, the derisive Cold War-era description of the Soviet Union by Xan Smiley, a British journalist.

The imbalance between massive military spending and a relatively undeveloped civilian economy that the jibe highlighted is the bane of all Third World countries, not excluding India. India’s additional grievance is that the Americans balance it with Pakistan. A US state department memorandum justified this at the time of Independence by noting: “From the military point of view, the countries of South Asia excepting Pakistan have, under present and prospective conditions, little value to the United States.” Washington set its South Asian compass according to Cold War demands, and practised an astonishing sleight of hand to reject Indian appeals for a military relationship.

Avoiding a request to send a military mission to the US, the Americans killed India’s “attempt to establish a formal blueprint of relations” by replying that Washington did not engage in comprehensive discussions on overall policy even with a close neighbour and ally like Canada. Problems were tackled as and when they arose. The state department noted smugly how cleverly it had solved “the problem” (of the stream of high-powered delegates that Jawaharlal Nehru sent) by classifying India “upwards to the category of countries receiving ‘restricted’ US military information”, and making “a deliberate effort to furnish the Indian military attaché (in Washington) with relatively harmless but somewhat impressive military information”.

The reason? India was of “negligible positive strategic importance” to the US while Pakistan occupied “one of the most strategic areas in the world”. It could provide “a staging area for forces engaged in the defence or recapture of Middle East oil areas”. Pakistan was also ideal for “ideological and intelligence penetration” of the Soviet Union, while its ports were potential launching pads for air operations against the Soviet industrial heartland.

All that has changed. What has not is what the United States calls the “flashpoint” of Kashmir. And that can change too if Pakistan’s military rulers are sternly told that American goodies will dry up unless they come to terms with geography.

Security lies in cooperation, not confrontation, in an economic union that includes India and allows South Asia to tap its huge potential. Jawaharlal Nehru thought that a federal arrangement would allow a united autonomous Jammu and Kashmir to retain links with both countries. “Confederation rema-ins our ultimate goal,” he told Selig Harrison of the Washington Post. “Look at Europe, at the Common Market. This is the urge everywhere. There are no two peoples anywhere nearer than those of India and Pakistan, though if we say it, they are alarmed and think we want to swallow them.” That should also be the goal for his successors if they want peace and stability in the subcontinent instead of bitter fratricidal bloodshed.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author