The Tracks To Nowhere

The recent high-profile visit of a fairly large delegation of Indian parliamentarians, journalists andothers to Pakistan to participate in a seminar at Islamabad organised by a non-governmental media organisationhas been hailed by many as a good example of track 2 diplomacy in action to contribute to an improvement ofthe relations between the two countries.

The various lines of governmental and non-governmental communications and people-to-people contacts betweenthe two countries have been so badly clogged up since 1994 that any contact at any level for any purposereceives widespread media publicity and is hailed as track 2 diplomacy.

The decay of the lines of communications started in 1994 when the Benazir Bhutto Government, suspectingthat the violence and disorder in Karachi since 1990 were being orchestrated by Indian intelligence officersposted in the Indian Consulate-General in Karachi ordered it to close down. This did not lead to animprovement in the situation, thereby proving her suspicions to have been wrong.

Despite this, the Government of Pakistan has till now not allowed the Indian Consulate-General, which usedto provide consular assistance to millions of Mohajirs (refugees from India) in Pakistan and their relativesin India, to be re-opened. Surprisingly, for reasons which are not clear, the Government of India too has notbeen pressing the Government of Pakistan to allow it to be re-opened as part of the current exercise forimproving bilateral relations initiated by the Prime Minister, A.B.Vajpayee, in April last.

Periodic meetings or interactions of officials not connected with the Foreign Offices of the two countriessuch as the bi-annual meetings of the two Home Secretaries assisted by their senior intelligence officers, todiscuss border security problems, of the heads of the narcotics control agencies to discuss co-operation inthe fight against narcotics smugglers, of the two Directors-General of Military Operations (DGMO) etc havealso been discontinued. The only meetings of officials not connected with the Foreign Offices, which continueto take place, are of those responsible for the implementation of the Indus Water Treaty.

Even meetings of senior officials of the two Foreign Offices to discuss bilateral problems have not beenheld since Gen. Pervez Musharraf seized power on October 12,1999. Suggestions from India proposing visits bythe Indian Foreign Secretary and DGMO to Pakistan to prepare the ground work for the summit talks betweenVajpayee and Musharraf held at Agra in 2001 were peremptorily rejected by Musharraf. This lack of preparatorywork was one of the factors, which contributed to the failure of the summit.

The terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament House in New Delhi in December 2001 led to India withdrawingits High Commissioner from Islamabad and ordering Pakistan to withdraw its and to cut down the size of itsmission in New Delhi. All bus, train and air links and even overflight rights were suspended.

The repeated postponements of the summits of the SAARC deprived the leaders and senior officials of the twocountries of opportunities even for an informal pow-wow in the margins of such multilateral meetings. Thematters came to such a pass that even when they happened to attend other multilateral meetings, not connectedwith the SAARC, they were noticed avoiding even eye-contact with each other.

Since the initiative taken by Vajpayee in April, things are on the mend -- slowly, but steadily. The newHigh Commissioners of the two countries are back in position in their respective posts. Diplomatic andofficial visas are again being issued after a long suspension enabling the two countries to rotate their staffin their respective missions. The bus service between Lahore and New Delhi has been resumed and talks on therestoration of civil aviation links are to take place shortly.

Before the attack on the Indian Parliament House, at least non-governmental experts of the two countries,including retired senior government servants, were visiting each other's country periodically to attendseminars on matters such as confidence-building measures, which produced a lot of bonhomie, but no substantiveresults or wisdom. Even instances of such seminaring declined after the attack.

Against this background of an almost total lack of communications and interactions, any visit by anybody ofsome importance to the other country attracted media hype and was projected as the resumption of the track 2diplomacy circuit. It is in this context that the excitement created in the two countries over the recentvisit of Maulana Fazlur Rahman, the leader of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema Islam of Pakistan, to India in July and ofthe non-governmental Indian delegation to Pakistan this month have to be viewed.

Were these really track 2 diplomacy visits as the dramatis personae have claimed or goodwill missions orjust shopping jaunts or an Indo-Pakistan jamboree as some have sarcastically dismissed them? In thesub-continent the expression track 2 diplomacy is used so loosely that there must be more track 2 diplomatsroaming all over the place, followed by TV camera crews, with expressions of goodwill oozing out of their facethan the official track 1 diplomats.

The expression track 2 diplomacy was first coined by two officials of the US State Department in 1982, inan article on US foreign policy. They defined track 2 diplomacy as diplomacy through "informal,unofficial interaction between members of adversary groups or nations." Subsequently, others have definedit as unofficial or citizen diplomacy. In other words, diplomacy to avoid or resolve conflicts through theintermediary of persons not forming a member of a State or a Government involved in the conflict.

The definition has been further fine-tuned and one now talks of multi-track diplomacy, involving fourtracks. Track 1 refers to diplomacy engaged in by the policy-makers themselves -- at the political andbureaucratic levels. Track 2 refers to attempts to avoid or deal with conflicts through non-governmentalintermediaries with close links to the governmental policy-makers. It is undertaken by them generally at theinstance of track 1 diplomats to find a way out of difficult situations without feelings of loss of face oneither side, without negative consequences if the diplomacy fails and without embarrassment if there isleakage to the media and the public. Track 3 is about conflict-avoidance or conflict-resolution effortsundertaken by prominent non-governmental personalities, with or without links to the policy-makers, at theirown initiative .

Track 4 is about creating a congenial atmosphere through people-to-people contacts in order to facilitateconflict avoidance or resolution. The objective of track 4 is not to find a solution, but to lessen or removethe poison and distrust in the atmosphere, in the hope that this would facilitate a search for an accordthrough any of the other three tracks.

To succeed, track 2 has to be discreet and unpublicised, with knowledge of it restricted to as few personsas possible. Since track 1 officials or leaders are often at the rear of track 2 players, unwise publicitycould prove counter-productive and make positions even more rigid than they were before the efforts wereundertaken.

This requirement is not there in the case of track 3 (e.g.seminaring) and track 4 diplomacies. In fact,publicity in a right measure could prove beneficial in their limited objective of paving the way for track 1or 2 diplomacy. The recent visit of the Indian non-governmental delegation to Pakistan would thus come underthe definition of track 4 and not track 2 diplomacy.

Track 1 diplomacy itself has two facets -- the formally structured and the informally designed ones. Theinformally-designed ones generally fall into two categories -- back-channel diplomacy and para-diplomacy. Bothof them involve the participation of official policy-makers or advisers, but in an informal, unpublicisedsetting, without a formal agenda. The objective is not to find a solution, but to pick each other's brain inthe search for a solution and to remove distrust by explaining official stands to the other side in a mannerthat could not be done openly.

As examples of back-channel diplomacy, one could cite the many discreet meetings between trusted officialsin the offices of Rajiv Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto in 1988-89 to find a way out of the imbroglio over theSiachen issue and the post 9/11 contacts between US and Iranian officials accredited to the UN offices inGeneva to discuss counter-terrorism co-operation.

As examples of para-diplomacy, one could cite the visit of the late R.N. Kao, the founding father of theResearch & Analysis Wing (R&AW), India's external intelligence agency, to Washington DC in the early1980s at the instance of Indira Gandhi to remove certain misunderstandings between the US and India; his visitto Beijing in 1984 to test the waters for a possible visit to China by her to normalise bilateral relations;the visit of the then chief of the R&AW to China in 1988 and his role in facilitating a successful visitby Rajiv Gandhi to China; and the three unpublicised meetings between the chiefs of the R&AW andPakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) held between 1988 and 1991 to discuss the Siachen issue andIndia's allegations of Pakistani support to terrorism in Indian Punjab.

A typical example of track 2 diplomacy was the unpublicised meetings between two non-governmentalpersonalities enjoying the confidence of Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif, the then Pakistani Prime Minister, at theheight of the Kargil conflict in 1999 to find a way out of the crisis away from the glare of publicity. Theexercise had to be aborted because of malign leakage to the media of the information about the meetings byMusharraf, who somehow came to know of them and was unhappy over it.

Non-conventional diplomacy -- whether track 2, 3 or 4 -- has limited scope for success in the case ofPakistan because of the ingrained hostility of the Pakistani military to India, its unquenched desire forrevenge against India by annexing Jammu & Kashmir because of the humiliation suffered by it at the handsof the Indian army in 1971, its penchant for misreading non-conventional diplomatic initiatives andconciliatory approaches as indicators of a weakening of the Indian will and battle fatigue and its calculationthat a confrontational approach and high rhetoric would bring in US intervention to its benefit.

Despite all the conciliatory moves made by our Prime Minister since April and the positive public reactionin Pakistan to the recent visit of the Indian non-governmental delegation to Pakistan, the military leadershipand the political leadership subservient to the military have not moved an inch from Pakistan's statedpositions on any of the issues, whether J&K, normalisation of economic relations or ending its sponsorshipof terrorism against India.

In an address to a seminar organised by an Islamabad think-tank before the arrival of the Indiandelegation, Musharraf claimed that as result of Pakistan's nuclear deterrence and his success in reducing theconventional military asymmetry, Pakistan has achieved what he described as a no-win situation. He evidentlymeant thereby that as a result of his skilful military and political leadership, India will no longer be ableto win a conventional military war against Pakistan.

In his apparent, but not openly stated calculation, this has provided scope for Pakistan for continuing itsunconventional, indirect war against India without having to fear a conventional retaliation by India. SinceIndia has made it obvious through its inactions that it does not have the stomach for an unconventionalresponse against Pakistan, he calculates that it is only a question of time before he succeeds in forcingIndia to come to terms with a change of the status quo in J&K.

So long as this mentality persists, non-conventional diplomatic approaches are unlikely to succeed. Ourrepeatedly trying them would prove counter-productive.

As long as Musharraf continues in power and persists with his present policy of supporting terrorism, Indiawill have only two policy options. Either adopt a covert, deniable operational policy to make the Pakistanarmy pay a price for its sponsorship of terrorism or, if we do not have the stomach for it, strengthen ourinternal security to deny repeated successes to the Pakistan-sponsored terrorists and wait for the emergenceof a more reasonable leadership in Islamabad, while keeping the normal lines of communications open.

Before his death last year, Kao told this writer in a correspondence:" We must let Pakistan stew inits own juice." He was of the view that Musharraf and Pakistan must be ignored with the contempt theydeserve till they come to their senses. This advice remains as valid today as it was two years ago.

(B. Raman is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director,Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Convenor, Observer Research Foundation (ORF), Chennai Chapter.)