The Manmohan Singh-Yousuf Raza Gilani Flying Circus went to and came back from Mohali, all a good day?s work for the two Prime Ministers beset with myriad other troubles. It raised expectations, with spin doctors hard at work. Former aides of Dr Singh recalled in glowing terms the arcanae of his last initiative in 2005. The impact of this latest bonhomie between the two leaders on the fraught Indo-Pak situation is likely to be even less than that on the foretold outcome of the cricket match.
There is as much precedent for informal meetings between the two heads of governments leading nowhere as there is for the World Cup encounters between the two nations. India won all four previous matches as it did on March 30, 2011. The 1987 Gen Zia visit to Jaipur ostensibly for a cricket match was followed by heightened cross-border insurgency in Kashmir valley from 1989 onwards. The bus journey of 1999 was followed by the Kargil war and the 2005 visit by Gen Musharraf to Delhi did nothing to stop the attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul, and far more tragically, the 26/11 carnage in Mumbai.
If this were the only burden of history, one would be happy to join the band of revellers in Mohali to say that the past must be overcome with these new people-to-people bonding (we have been here as well; these sentiments are expressed de rigueur following every sports contact between the two countries). What militates against any expectation of normalcy of relations between the two countries is far too widespread and deep-seated animosity, unlikely to be overcome by these superficial balms.
This is based on what I consider to be a realistic, but hard-headed assessment and not any personal prejudice or bias. The process began in 1997, when I visited Pakistan with an entrepreneur friend, at the behest of Syed Babar Ali, a leading businessman and former finance minister of Pakistan, who was then the head of the Nestle Group in Pakistan. The purpose was to discuss possible joint ventures in completely non-strategic and mutually supportive areas. We travelled to Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, and met a number of prominent persons in politics, business, academics and civil society.
I came back greatly impressed by what Pakistan represented then. This was the start of the second Nawaz Sharif administration. Just prior to our visit, he had announced a whole slew of reforms, more far reaching than ours. Pakistan had undertaken an aggressive campaign to attract foreign investment and the international community was then more inclined towards Pakistan than India as an investment destination. Our travels around the country showed far less evidence of poverty and squalor and much greater middle class influence as compared to India.
Among other things, we had worked out possible joint ventures for seeds and planting materials and food processing, which we all thought would have no problem of getting the required approvals. We believed they would have been the first joint ventures between the two countries. Babar Ali was also the founder-president of the Lahore University of Management Studies, almost a mirror image of our own IIM, Ahmedabad. Knowing my association with the latter, he had organised a meeting and there seemed to be a genuine interest in pursuing mutually beneficial contact and exchange of views and visits.
We pursued these initiatives for some time, up to the time of Vajpayee?s visit two years later on. Nothing came out of these even after that euphoric journey. I have since given much thought to the possible reasons for this and compared notes with other Indian business travellers. Among these is an old classmate who headed the South Asian arm of an American cutting-edge medical technology enterprise and visited Pakistan often.
In my early enthusiasm, I had put aside a couple of factors, which I believe are critical. The first is the overall Pakistani middle class view holding Kashmir to be theirs by divine right and all of India being beneath contempt. Senior politicians in their salons, business persons in their clubs and schoolchildren in Clifton roadside eateries in Karachi all believed that India as a whole was poor, dirty, corrupt and opportunistic. We met the patron saint of Track-II diplomacy in Pakistan, Mubashar Hassan, who was a founding-father of the Pakistan People?s Party and the finance minister to ZA Bhutto. He treated us to a monologue on how India was so wrong on Kashmir and then spoke at length to another visitor about his acute discomfort in Delhi during his recent visit caused by the filth and the obsequious people.
The second is what we never discussed with anyone there: the completely unquestioning adherence to Islam and the rock-solid belief that the infidels were inferior beings. Politeness prevented our hosts from saying this openly to our faces, but their questioning of our mores and ethos at all times left us in no doubt about what was in their mind.
We have since moved on. India is now on the ascendant and Pakistan in decline. Yet what binds our neighbour together even in this phase is the very logic that brought it into being in the first place: a complete antipathy to India. To say this is not to overlook our own intolerance of Pakistan. But we now have other, more important and worthwhile external focal points for our sights. Pakistan, sadly, continues to be monomaniacally obsessed with India. Even in cricket, we can rejoice almost as much in beating Australia as we do in defeating Pakistan, but the rivals across the border seek the holy grain of coming up trumps against us.
?Aman ka chhakka (sixer for peace)? is how the Pakistani media described Manmohan Singh?s invitation to the Mohali match. Gone for a six, an expression familiar to schoolboys playing cricket to describe the failure of a major effort, could be a more appropriate translation!
The author has taught at IIMA and helped set up IRMA