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Experts see US role in PM's invitation

Aziz Haniffa
India Abroad Correspondent in Washington

Leading American experts on South Asia believe that Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's invitation to Pakistan's military leader General Pervez Musharraf to visit India for bilateral talks was to pre-empt any US activism on Kashmir.

Professor Stephen P Cohen, considered the doyen of South Asia specialists in the US, told India Abroad that in the wake of Washington urging New Delhi for long to re-engage in a dialogue with Islamabad, the recent surprising decision by Vajpayee, after having held off for nearly two years, was because India "wanted to pre-empt any greater American activism".

"This is a negative," he acknowledged, "but another negative was that the dialogue with the Kashmiris had broken down," he said.

Thus, according to Cohen, who heads the South Asia programme at the Brookings Institution, New Delhi "wanted to talk to the Pakistanis directly. I think India wants to keep control of the process. Not that there is any American initiative, but there might be and there still could be."

Two months ago, the Bush administration quietly sponsored a major conference on Kashmir and, in addition to inviting leading US academics and scholars to participate, also flew in Indian and Pakistani specialists from New Delhi, Islamabad and London.

Also on April 6, when External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh met Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in Washington, the US urged India to think beyond the Kargil war and resurrect its dialogue with Pakistan that had seemed so promising when both sides had kicked off the Lahore process.

This plea by Washington was reinforced by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage when he visited India recently and met Singh and Vajpayee.

Cohen noted that "more important, I think the Indians are pretty confident now that if there is a US role -- and I am sure there will be, though not a high-profile role -- they can use us constructively to put pressure on Pakistan. So there is no worry in New Delhi of the Americans and Pakistanis ganging up together."

When Singh made the announcement last week about India's about-turn in deciding to invite Musharraf, the US expressed elation at the development since it acknowledged that Washington had been pushing for such a dialogue and the resurrection of the Lahore process at the highest level.

But US officials denied having exerted pressure on India to do so. "We are not going to take credit for Vajpayee's invitation to Musharraf," an official said, adding that even as the US had kept urging for a resumption of the dialogue, Washington was always sensitive to New Delhi's concerns that such a dialogue could take place only if the right climate was created.

"We kept talking to the Pakistanis and telling them that it is important that this take place in the appropriate environment," the official said, obviously referring to US exhortations to Islamabad that it rein in the militants and eschew fomenting the insurgency in Kashmir by sponsoring groups like the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen -- which is listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the US -- and the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba -- on the verge of being designated thus.

But Sumit Ganguly, professor of Asian Studies and government at the University of Texas in Austin, said, "I am sure American pressure played a role."

However, he said, "it is important not to overstate the case. For some time, this regime has tried to tinker with various strategies to reduce tensions in Kashmir despite grave provocation. I think that unlike a number of previous regimes the folks in charge of security policy in this regime actually have a strategic vision of sorts."

Ganguly, who is just completing a book, Fearful Symmetry: Explaining the Indo-Pakistani Conflict, which will be published simultaneously by Columbia University Press and Oxford University Press, argued that "they [the strategic thinkers in the current Indian government] do want India to emerge on the global stage as a serious player and they are prepared to take some tough decisions to get to that arena. This decision is entirely in keeping with that strategy."

"Now if the Pakistanis simply return to their old, tired refrain of the plebiscite, at least some other key players in the world will suggest that Pakistan's decision-makers need to grow up," he said.

Ganguly said that "inviting Musharraf, even though it is unlikely to yield much that is tangible in the immediate term, was a clever and courageous tactical move. Clever, because now the onus shifts to Pakistan to take the next step, and courageous because many of the fire-breathers in New Delhi still cannot countenance inviting the mastermind of Kargil for a parley to New Delhi over kebabs and naan."

He added that it was "also a deft move" on the part of Delhi "because they did this in concert with an end to the ceasefire. The ceasefire was yielding few tangible results and the hard-line politicians and military forces were becoming quite restive."

"This tandem move enabled the regime to look good before the international community," Ganguly said, "and it met the demands of the professional military and the hardliners in the party and also held out some, albeit limited, prospect for reviving the peace process."

Cohen said breaking off the ceasefire was really no big deal. "It was a Swiss cheese ceasefire. It wasn't a serious ceasefire. You do something soft and you do something hard -- the carrot and stick policy."

He said what was most significant was that "the border has been quiet for at least a year now and the Indians regard that as acceptable".

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