Just people-to-people contact wont help for lasting peace
Pakistani elite not ready to embrace India: Haqqani
New Delhi: India and Pakistan may be talking peace but the ruling elite in Islamabad is not ready to strike genuine friendship with New Delhi, visiting scholar and former prime ministerial adviser Hussain Haqqani said Wednesday.
Haqqani, a Pakistani who resides in the US and whose book “Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military” has made waves, said the time had come for Pakistan to give up competing with India.
“What is needed to restore the knotty problem in India-Pakistan relations is political will,” Haqqani, attached to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washongton, told a gathering at the India International Centre here.
“That political will does not exist in the Pakistani military and intelligence,” he said, calling them an oligarchy.
The Pakistani rulers, he explained, were of the opinion that the peace process was meant to checkmate India.
He added: "Although it (elite) says normalisation in relations is needed with India, it has not made a paradigm shift…
"The core issue is: can Pakistani oligarchy sustain itself without some level of hostility vis-à-vis India?
“Pakistan needs a stable relationship with its largest neighbour for its own internal stability.”
Haqqani, visiting New Delhi as a guest of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, said the Pakistani establishment was treating the current peace process with India as a dance, not a marriage.
“A dance is not an engagement,” he said, underlining the need for genuine friendship between South Asia’s two most bitter neighbours who have been locked in an uneasy peace process since 2003.
At the same time, Haqqani said India needed to make it amply clear that it had no desire to undo the sub-continent’s 1947 division that gave birth to Pakistan and to pursue policies that strengthened the peace constituency in his country.
But Haqqani’s concentration was mainly on Pakistan, where he has served as an adviser to Pakistani prime ministers Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto. He was Pakistan’s envoy to Sri Lanka in 1992-93.
He said the Pakistani decision making elite remained “ideological” while the military was “conservative”.
Their three main pillars of their thinking, he said, was that Islam was the unifying factor in Pakistan, competition with India was a good rallying point, and that the US would compensate for Pakistan’s relative weakness.
But he warned: “The Pakistani elite should give up competing with India. It is not working, it cannot work.”
Haqqani, a former journalist, also found fault with New Delhi for trying to negotiate with Pakistani military rulers who lacked democratic sanctity and genuine popular support, be it the late Zia ul-Haq or the present President Pervez Musharraf.
The India-Pakistan relationship, he underlined, would change if only Pakistan’s political dynamics changed. “The internal dynamics of Pakistan has a larger impact on India-Pakistan ties than the internal dynamics of India.”
Haqqani emphasized that despite the growing visibility of Islamic political parties in Pakistan, there were fewer people in the country who wanted war with India.
“I don’t think there is a war constituency any more,” he said. “And the peace constituency in Pakistan is much larger than it is thought here.”
And he conceded that Pakistan, while seeking concessions from India, also had to keep in mind the sensitivities of its larger neighbour.
“Smaller countries also have to take into consideration and accept that there is a 800-pound guerrilla and learn to live with it.”
