Thawing Indina-Pakistan's enduring cold war

Widespread anxiety was aroused last year when Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests added a new and worrying dimension to the enduring Cold War between the once united neighbors. The Jakarta Post's Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin analyses the latest effort at trying to improve relations between the two new nuclear powers.

HONG KONG (JP): "Is it Springtime in Indo-Pakistan Relations?" ran the Times of India headline on Feb. 4, and, for once, the answer seemed to be "yes".

On Feb. 20, barring last minute complications, a new diplomatic technique will make its bow on the Indian subcontinent, that of "bus diplomacy."

Like many other modern media-related techniques, bus diplomacy deals with form more than substance. But even the outward form of Indo-Pakistan relations has been so rotten over the years that it has to improve first, before there can be any modest enhancement of the inner substance of the relationship.

Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee well illustrated the abject state of relations between the subcontinental neighbors when they met in New York last year -- and agreed on the need for "confidence- building measures".

CBM were originally dreamed up as a diplomatic technique for wrestling with the tensions of the US-Soviet Cold War. The Indo- Pakistan Cold War has never been quite as bitter as the Soviet- American one could be on occasions.

But it did actually get hot on three occasions, has long outlasted all but the Cold War in Korea, and is now openly underpinned by nuclear weapons.

The CBM tentatively agreed by the two Prime Minister in New York was a new bus service between Delhi and Lahore.

Sharif can claim the immediate credit for inventing bus diplomacy. The New Delhi to Lahore bus service had a successful test run in January and was due to start regular runs sometime soon. Interviewed by The Indian Express, (itself an unusual Cold War occurrence) Sharif suggested that Vajpayee should come to Pakistan on the inaugural run. Vajpayee made bus diplomacy a reality, by agreeing to come almost as soon as he read of the invitation. Vajpayee further suggested that Nawaz Sharif should come back with him when that inaugural run returns to India.

We could solve a lot of problems on the journey, the Pakistan leader has hopefully suggested. Well, maybe.

But given the inordinate amount of time which it takes for ordinary passengers to cross the Indo-Pakistan border, running the gamut of immigration and customs officials who really believe in making the Cold War into a bureaucratic nightmare, he has a point.

Four caveats must be carefully noted.

It may be springtime in the relationship -- but it has been an awfully long winter. Until 1947, under British rule, leaving aside the anomaly of the hundreds of princely states, there was One India. Railway lines and roads, not to mention goods and services, plus families and firms, covered the whole country. Amidst, and after, the mutual massacres that accompanied partition, nearly all these links between India and Pakistan were liquidated too.

Today all the railway lines, bar one, end at the respective borders. Indo-Pakistan trade has shriveled into insignificance. Two separate economies have been created out of one. In other words, the sheer completeness of the partition of the country remains a tragic fact, as well as the main post-partition Indo- Pakistan achievement.

That almost wholly negative accomplishment will not be easily undone.

Secondly, the arrival of bus diplomacy could have something to do with the fairly regular presence in the subcontinent of American deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott. Around the time when bus diplomacy was born, Talbott was visiting again, pressuring both India and Pakistan to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the CNTBT, before the remaining sanctions, imposed last June in the wake of the Indian and Pakistan nuclear tests, could be lifted.

Both India and Pakistan want to end the sanctions. With or without US pressure, both Vajpayee and Sharif see wider advantages in improving their mutual relationship.

China could recently be heard complaining that the US had given up pressuring the two nations to also sign the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. The truth there would seem to be that the US now recognizes the obvious: that it impossible to get either India or Pakistan to meekly surrender their nuclear weapons. China apparently is still hoping for the impossible.

Thirdly, -- and this may be very difficult for Beijing to understand -- the prospect of Indo-Pakistan bus diplomacy coincides with, perhaps even originates from, and is certainly enhanced by, cricket diplomacy.

It is ten years since the first and only Indian Prime Ministerial visit (by Rajiv Gandhi) to Pakistan to date. It is also ten years since India and Pakistan played a Test series in each others country.

But cricket-mad India and Pakistan are playing each other in India right now for the first time in a decade. Sharif could initiate bus diplomacy not merely because Pakistan had won the first Test, but because when they did so, the Indian crowd in Madras gave the Pakistani team a standing ovation.

Even more important, Vajpayee had faced down the extremist Hindu Shiv Sena faction which had already dug up the cricket pitch in Delhi and had threatened to disrupt the cricket Tests. (But the reconstituted Delhi cricket pitch suited India's spin bowlers just fine, enabling India to defeat Pakistan and draw the series.)

The subcontinent was divided when Hindu and Muslim pre- independence leaders gave in to extremist pressures. The damage of partition will only begin to be undone, very belatedly, if those extremist pressures are now firmly resisted. Extremists on both sides have now threatened to disrupt bus diplomacy on either side of the border.

They must not be allowed any leeway.

Meanwhile another little noticed adjunct, hockey diplomacy, has been wending its way through the subcontinent, mainly bolstering Pakistani morale. Four test matches have been played in India and five are being played in Pakistan. India once dominated the sport but Pakistan, so far, leads 4-1 in the series.

Fourth, there must be some regret that railway diplomacy has not been preferred to bus diplomacy. The one Indo- Pakistan rail link has been open for several years now.

The Samjauta Express leaves twice a week from Amritsar in India at 9.30 am, and from Lahore in Pakistan at 11.30 am. The distance between Amritsar and Lahore Junction is only 46 kilometers. Yet the train from India takes 4 hours 35 minutes, the train from Pakistan an hour less -- if they are on time. They seldom are. The train is a perfect symbol of partition. It is the bureaucratic hazard of crossing the border, not the train, which takes so much time.

Railway diplomacy would have given Sharif and Vajpayee more space, more time and more comfort for their get- together. While bus diplomacy is better than nothing, there is a suspicion that the extremist threats, plus normal security precautions, have resulted in a highly truncated form for the inaugural run.

Vajpayee will not now be plying the whole Delhi-Lahore route. This is a pity, since a top leader doing such a journey would have been a happy reminder of the pre-independence days when all Indians thought nothing of criss-crossing the undivided Punjab.

The original plan was for two buses. One would serve the inaugural run for ordinary passengers, while another would merely take Vajpayee on the 40-kilometer journey from Amritsar airport to the Pakistan border, where he will be met by Sharif. Vajpayee's bus will not proceed any further. Sharif will take Vajpayee to Lahore by helicopter. Even the hordes of mediapersons trying to play up the story may have difficulty making bus diplomacy into a full-fledged symbol of Indo-Pakistan amity.

But the likely cancellation of the bus for ordinary passengers brilliantly illustrates the damage done by partition and the ensuing Cold War. With 48 hours to go, there were no paying passengers wishing to go from Delhi to Lahore.

So it is too soon for to be too hopeful. Springtime has been in prospect for Indo-Pakistan relations several times in the past. Just as often there was a quick relapse back into winter. India and Pakistan are still shooting at each other on the Siachen glacier high up in the Himalayas.

Whatever happens now, as a result of "bus diplomacy", an Indo- Pakistan summer will remain a long way off.