The People Next Door

Title: The People Next Door – The Curious History of India’s Relations with Pakistan
Author: T C A Raghavan
Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2017 (First)
ISBN: 9789352770908
Pages: 348

 ‘The Adventure of Silver Blaze’ is a very famous and thrilling Sherlock Holmes story for the insights the detective infers from the scene of a crime. There is a passage in it that goes like this:

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That was the curious incident."

The story involves deceit, avarice, crime and punishment. Likewise, India-Pakistan relations also involve most of these attributes and the curious incident is that bilateral relations have not improved a bit in spite of laborious measures undertaken by both sides. As far as India is concerned, Pakistan was always a pain on the western frontier. The nations had fought two large-scale and two small-scale wars over the issue of disputed territory. After realizing the futility of its desire to humble India on the battlefield, Pakistan turned to sponsoring terrorism as state policy to ‘bleed India through a thousand cuts’. The one thing that stands out from this exercise is India’s surprising resilience which always stood one step ahead of its troublesome neighbour. This book is a nice recap of India-Pakistan relations written with the authority of knowledge and experience. T C A Raghavan is a former Indian envoy to Pakistan. He also served in the Pakistan desk in India’s external affairs ministry and as director in the office of India’s foreign minister. Even though no personal anecdotes are mentioned in the book, the author has encapsulated the entire gamut of the relations between the two countries and presented his deductions with a commendable sense of justice and richness with every nuance carefully inserted at the right moment. The typical behaviour of the so called liberal intellectuals in India is to regret the partition that had occurred in 1947 and their wistful longing for Pakistan to come back to India and undo the partition. A useful takeaway from the book is the warning about the irritation such a desire would evoke in Pakistanis. Raghavan enunciates the point that Partition cannot be undone and what is doable is peaceful coexistence at least as non-meddling neighbours if not as friends.

The book narrates several incidents of India-Pakistan relations that vitiated the atmosphere but still are not widely known. Pakistan continues to harbour persons who are fugitives from Indian law such as Dawood Ibrahim, Hafiz Sayeed and Masood Azhar. This one fact amply demonstrates its enmity and hatred to India’s wellbeing. In fact, this is nothing new and was followed right from its existence. The peculiar episode of Bhupat daku is a case in point. Bhupat was a Hindu dacoit from Junagadh in Gujarat who was wanted in the context of 82 murders and several robberies. He escaped to Pakistan to evade Indian law. He was detained there for a year for illegal entry and thereafter it refused to deport him to stand trial for his crimes in India. This was sheer spite as Pakistan had no claim on him. Bhupat then converted to Islam and posed as a freedom fighter from Junagadh who opposed India’s takeover of that state in 1947. Pakistan never extradited him and he died in 2006. This policy is continued in the case of others too. However, with the recently rising trend of ‘unidentified gunmen’ disposing summary justice to some people wanted by India, the continued efficacy of this policy is in doubt.

Even though Afghanistan plays only a marginal role in India-Pakistan strategic reviews, its potential to seriously influence the regional balance is mentioned in the book. This perspective is very rarely seen in books of this genre. The British had unilaterally imposed the Durand Line of border demarcation between undivided India and Afghanistan thereby separating the Pashtun homeland into two. When the British left, the Pashtuns wanted to reunite with Afghanistan but there was no provision to revisit the frontiers on the northwest of Pakistan. Consequently, Afghanistan was the sole member state opposing Pakistan’s entry to the United Nations. Then came the invasion of Kashmir by Pakistani irregular troops in 1947. The UN ordered a ceasefire to which Pakistan proposed a conditional offer. They claimed the invasion to be on security grounds which included preventing India establishing a link for the movement of Pathanistan and to preclude the possibility of a pincer attack by India and Afghanistan. The Soviet occupation beginning in 1979 and the post-Taliban regime were eras in which Pakistan experienced a hostile neighbour on both the east and the west.

The people had to make a hard choice at the time of Partition in the provinces which were bifurcated. Hindus and Sikhs chose India while the Muslims selected Pakistan. The book lists out some Muslims who opted for India even though their native places were within Pakistan and their subsequent actions as it reflected on the relationship between the two countries. Most of these Muslims occupied high positions of power in the bureaucracy. Badruddin Tyabji was one of them working as secretary in the external affairs ministry. He advised Nehru to consider Pakistan as his ‘constituency’ in which he has to get elected. He also suggested treating the government of Pakistan as the opposition and that his reactions to Pakistan should be entirely those of one who was standing for election from there (p.50). In other words, this man was advising Nehru to offer maximum concessions to Pakistan! Nehru fully accepted the counsel was proved by his gifting of 80 per cent of the Indus waters in a treaty also co-signed by the World Bank. A very useful book on the Indus Waters Treaty named 'Indus Divided: India, Pakistan and the River Basin Dispute’ by Daniel Haines was reviewed earlier here. Nehru also agreed to conduct a plebiscite in Kashmir but barely wriggled out of the deal citing US-Pakistan military alliance concluded in the meanwhile. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, India’s first education minister, asked Afzal Iqbal, a Pakistani diplomat, regarding the military treaty: “Why did you do this? Kashmir was falling on your lap like a ripe fruit” (p.52). The Urdu poetry in India was also a fit case of doubtful loyalty. The author narrates some differences in mutual perception taking the case of Urdu poetry in the aftermath of the 1965 war. Indian Urdu poets deliberately introduced a line of separation between the people and rulers of Pakistan with the implied suggestion that the Pakistani society is not to blame even though the country was at war with India. This demarcation was purely fictional. On the other hand, the Pakistani Urdu poets had no hesitation at all in branding the whole of India – people and rulers alike – as enemy and called for a jihad. Ali Sardar Jafri extolled the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz and argued that Indian poets should have friendship and sympathy for the people of Pakistan. This was when Faiz was actively supporting the Pakistani war machine and vigorously participating in war mushairas (p.92).

Raghavan includes a pointed analysis of the history of mutual dialog between the two neighbours. Nehru was damagingly generous (as far as India is concerned) but Indira Gandhi was curt most of the time, giving Pakistan no quarter. Pakistan was summarily defeated and split apart doing her tenure as prime minister in 1971. But the Janata party regime that followed (1977-79) was not firm enough with Pakistan. The 1971 victory had changed the Pakistani perspective on India’s fighting spirit. Disparaging rebukes like one Pakistani Muslim is equivalent to ten Hindus in the battlefield had given way to cold and rational estimates of military potential of both countries. Mani Sankar Aiyer, who was the Consul General in Karachi during this time, says that as compared to 1971, the prospect of a conflict with India generated not excitement and conviction of victory but fear and apprehension at the certainty of defeat. This, coupled with the change of guard in Pakistan in the form of General Zia ul Haq, ensured friendly terms for the Janata government. As the painful memory of Bangladesh gradually receded to the background, Pakistan again turned belligerent. Unusually meek overtures from India elicited only contemptuous response from the other side of the border. In June 1996 when Prime Minister Deve Gowda and foreign minister Gujral wrote to their counterparts seeking resumption of foreign secretary-level talks, not even a reply was received. The Gujral doctrine postulated India making unilateral and non-reciprocal concessions to its neighbours (p.221). A B Vajpayee at first stole the show with the explosion of nuclear devices, but then yielded to Pakistan even in the face of growing terrorist attacks in the country and hijacking of a commercial airliner. The secret incursion in Kargil fully exposed Pakistani duplicity. It also illustrated the futility of waiting for international diplomatic pressure to mount on Pakistan for effecting a withdrawal of its troops from Kargil. It was the might of the Indian army and its weaponry that drove Pakistani invaders scurrying to their lair. This was also a classic instance of Pakistan misjudging Indian will and ability to fight back. Of course, the author strictly maintains a tone of balance and an air of equanimity in the narrative exercising special care not to exhibit partisanship, but the message readers get is what is mentioned above.

The book shows a peculiar trait of early Indian envoys to Pakistan as of being under the illusion that partition was a temporary affair and they were working in a region not different from their homeland. Their familiarity with Pakistani officials and a shared common language of Urdu was instrumental in creating a superficial and illusive bonhomie. India’s envoy Kewal Singh attended the wedding of Pakistan foreign minister’s son in Rawalpindi while the 1965 war was raging in Kashmir. The reception was hostile, but he still found some excuse to praise the ‘grace and courtesy’ of some who behaved politely with him. Besides, he had gifted a Benarsi saree to the bride. This was auctioned by the family and the raised money deposited in the Pakistan defence fund (p.86). The author also notes the lengths to which India would go to prevent foreign agencies intervening in Kashmir often at great loss and inconvenience to itself. In the case of the Salal hydroelectric project on the river allotted to Pakistan in the Indus Waters Treaty, India agreed to significantly reduce the height of the check dam and unilaterally cut short the power generation capability in a bid to avoid seeking international arbitration as per the treaty. Raghavan does not propose any magic formula to settle the issues between the two countries. The implication between the lines is that the serious differences are not to be ironed out in any length of time or in any number of meetings. The issues remain exactly as it were before to create an impression that nothing has changed for the better since 1947. But the author notes that ‘clearly enough has changed to make sure that older solutions will not work’. This also puts former foreign minister Natwar Singh’s prescient remark that ‘the future in Indo-Pakistan relations lie in the past’ in bright focus.

The crucial role played by Pakistan army in shaping public opinion in that country is not fully addressed in this book. The irrelevance of elected representatives in deciding long term policy of Pakistan is notorious but not elaborated here. Instead, Raghavan observes that adulation and exasperation with the army controls Pakistan’s response to India. If the army has overplayed its card, the civilians show good regard to India, but once the army retakes its lost ground in domestic politics, this is reversed. In short, Pakistan is forever waiting for an unguarded moment from India to pounce on her. However, with the rising economic heft of India after 2000, they are finding it slightly difficult to keep pace with India. With financial and military gap further widening between the two countries with each passing year, Pakistan is likely to resort once again to unconventional warfare such as terrorism in future. The book’s narrative ends by 2004. Even though coverage is extended to 2015 by means of an epilogue, it misses the most exciting episodes such as the surgical strikes and the Balakot operation.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star