Dream sequence

On 7 September 2005, India and Pakistan will commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the start of their most useless, and their most expensive war. They will remember the vanquished, they will commiserate the lost lives, they will recall the attendant heroism, and, if they are intelligent, they will mourn the consequences. No one is sure who won that war. But one thing is certain: both countries lost the peace that day. 1965 marked the second partition of India. What do I mean by that?

What does partition mean? The geopolitical meaning of partition is fairly obvious. You only have to consider the power and influence of a united Indian defence force to recognise its impact upon the region and the world. To the west Iran and Afghanistan would have been India's borders, and we would be a direct player in the eco-politics of the Middle East. To the north, our borders would have been with the Soviet Union and China; and to the east we would have been neighbours of Asean. There would have been an Indian factor for both the United States and Russia (or the USSR) to consider if they wanted to intervene directly in either the Middle East or Afghanistan. China would have been less eager to test the strength of India in a war, as it did in 1962. But most importantly, as the nation with the largest Hindu and Muslim populations, and a region of cultural and economic confluence, India would have been the centre of a world stretching from Morocco on the shores of the Atlantic to Indonesia on the further shores of the Indian Ocean, across an arc that would have included central Asia.

Since every 'If' is a waste of time, let us move on.

In human terms, partition wrenched out roots and caused a savage migration of peoples. But when the blood-red dust finally settled down, three ethnic groups were left divided: the Bengali Hindus, significant numbers of whom decided to remain in Bangladesh; Muslims from the UP-Bihar belt, who were cut apart when many of them chose migration over their motherland; and Kashmiri Muslims, who were left on two sides of a cease-fire line. Punjabi and Sindhi Hindus, and Punjabi Muslims, suffered severe traumas, but eventually reconciled themselves to their new homes even as they set in motion domestic passions that contributed heavily to conflict between the two countries. In Punjab the migration process was bloody and complete. Many Sindhi Hindus opted to remain in Pakistan, although they were marginalised politically.

Till 1965, the borders of the subcontinent were loose enough to permit what is called "family tourism" across both sides of Pakistan. Visas were a formality. There was also trade, enough of it unofficial to make borders an irrelevance. The war of 1965 put life into reverse gear. For nearly four decades now, the cost in human terms is matched only by the waste in economic opportunity and the investment in means and methods of destruction. So 1965 was the second partition. In 1947 geography had been partitioned; in 1965 the people were also partitioned.

Both the wars till then, of 1947 and 1965, were launched by Pakistan in order to wrest the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley from the Indian Union. The strategy was more or less the same: in 1947 "irregulars" were goaded into a "jihad", and in 1965 "infiltrators" were meant to reach Srinagar under the nose of an unsuspecting Indian Army. In the second war, the use of regular troops was more transparent, as the Pakistan Army was on official call to follow up with a decisive blow once the "irregulars" had completed their saboteur missions. 1947 ended with the creation of the Line of Control. 1965 did not change it. The one constant fact through two generations of turmoil has been the cease-fire line. The other thing that has remained with us is the dispute over Kashmir.

History is not a fashionable subject, so those who miss the irony when Pakistan asks for talks on Kashmir might be forgiven. If Pakistan had believed in talks over the future of Kashmir in 1947, the dispute would have long been solved. When the British left in 1947, the whole of the subcontinent did not become independent. Three rogue states refused to join either India or Pakistan. One, Junagadh, was in the possession of a maverick Nawab whose pretensions were quickly sorted out. But the two other states, Jammu and Kashmir and Hyderabad, were large and powerful. Their rulers believed that they could sustain some form of independence protected by treaty obligations with the British Empire, although the British had made it crystal clear that there was no third option available to the princely states. They would have to accede to either India or Pakistan.

In other words, the status of both Kashmir and Hyderabad would have inevitably entered the agenda of discussions between India, Pakistan and the British, represented in India by Lord Mountbatten, who was unique in the sense that he outlasted his own empire. He remained governor-general of India after freedom. A peaceful resolution would have certainly been found, with the involvement of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, by the time of the Nehru-Liaquat Pact in 1951, which put the seal on the outstanding issues of partition. But for some reason outside the realm of logic, or even common sense, Pakistan sought to pre-empt a peaceful solution through a war, initiated within just nine weeks of freedom. War, in other words, was the first substantive decision taken on India-Pakistan relations by Karachi (the first capital of Pakistan). Such bitter seeds produce a harvest through the decades.

Assuming that war as an option has been deleted; and presuming that Kargil was the last hurrah, how do we travel from here? Forward movement in this complex relationship requires both a minor somersault and a quantum leap. The somersault involves leaping through via 1965. The first challenge is to reverse the second partition. "Normalisation" is now treated as the situation before 13 December 2001, when our Parliament was attacked by terrorists while in session. But we should try and make people-to-people relations as friction-free as they were before 1965. This is not a very dramatic step, incidentally. There are very few neighbourhoods in the world where travel and trade are worse than existed between India and Pakistan in 1965. The world is loosening up under the pressure of emerging technology. The age of communication is free-range; this is a sprint, not a sack race.

A quantum leap of the imagination took place when Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, addressing the Hindustan Times Peace Dividend conference in Delhi, envisaged a time when there would be open borders and a single currency in South Asia. We have become so used to conflict that the thought of peace rattles us almost as much as the prospect of war. Those who noticed the phrase, tucked away in the midst of heavy statistics, responded with a range of queries. Was the Prime Minister being too naïve? Why must a dream be considered unreal simply because it has not become fact? Someone in 1950 dreamt that Europe should not go to war over German steel and Polish coal; and that Alsace and Lorraine, the execrable excuse for terrible Franco-German wars, would become irrelevant if a border was treated as an open door rather than a fortress wall. There is increasing evidence in South Asia that a door never opens upon a one-way street. Sri Lanka, among the smallest of the nations of South Asia, has free trade with the largest nation of the region, India. So what has happened as a consequence? The trade deficit has improved in Sri Lanka's favour since then. A smaller economy may have fewer products to offer India, but India has a much bigger market. The algebra is equitable.

War is tactical and strategic; peace is creative. Indians are thinking out of the box. The chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir says publicly that the Line of Control cannot be the eventual solution to the Kashmir impasse, because it is a Line of Conflict, not a Line of Resolution. Answers are hidden in the mists of the future, but everyone appreciates that the language of the past is not the answer. The answers lie in process, and process is an exercise of collective will, of movement on simultaneous fronts.

The spirit of this age accelerates time. Years now move at the pace of former decades. In the December of 2003 we are witnessing a conference of peace dividends. Precisely two years ago the air was full of little but the war dividend. As India mobilised on the borders, Islamabad retaliated with talk of a nuclear strike. George Fernandes, who believes that offence is the best form of defence, replied that while Pakistan might get in a first strike, the Indian response would be so massive that Pakistan would not survive. Dr Strangelove had Indian and Pakistani aliases. It was a nightmare. What is the only answer to a nightmare? A dream. Vajpayee has the courage to dream because he has lived through many a nightmare.

On 7 September 2005 India and Pakistan should remember the past by offering their people a future.

MJ Akbar is Chief Editor of the Asian Age.