Review: India’s Pakistan Conundrum by Sharat Sabharwal
A former Indian high commissioner in Islamabad takes an incisive look at the internal dynamics of the Pakistani state and its impact on India
When Sharat Sabharwal took over as the Indian high commissioner in Islamabad in March 2009, ties between India and Pakistan were at one of their proverbial lows because of the Mumbai attacks carried out by a 10-member team of terrorists from the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). He took on the onerous task of keeping the pressure on the Pakistan government to act against the perpetrators of the assault on India’s financial hub while simultaneously seeking to somehow repair bilateral ties.
Sabharwal was better placed than several of his predecessors, having served as deputy high commissioner in Islamabad during 1995-99 and having extensive contacts in Pakistan. It is both these stints that largely inform his book India’s Pakistan Conundrum: Managing a Complex Relationship, which takes an incisive look at the internal dynamics of the Pakistani state and its impact on India, especially in recent decades.
He is the latest in a string of former Indian officials and diplomats who have turned out books on Pakistan. Some of these, such as former high commissioner TCA Raghavan’s The People Next Door have focused on history to explain the current circumstances of India-Pakistan relations, while others have taken a closer look at the period or events when the authors were themselves posted in Pakistan or working on the country. Sabharwal’s book falls somewhere in between, moving between the history of one of India’s most complex diplomatic relationships and his own experiences in Pakistan.
While going into the reasons for Pakistan’s creation and existence, Sabharwal notes that the country was created “to segregate the Muslims of pre-partition India from Hindus” but the “notion of sundering” was subsequently taken to absurd limits through the rifts with minorities such as Ahmadis and Shias. “Bereft of a positive identity and a raison d’etre, it came to define itself as the antithesis of India.”
But Sabharwal also argues that Pakistan was “never a monolith and is today, more than ever before, not a monolith”, with the positive potential of hardworking and resilient Pakistanis “stymied by the army-dominated national security state and mindset poisoned by its propaganda”. He also cautions that objectivity demands that that the “reality of Pakistan is seen as it is, without our justified anger and frustration at its conduct clouding our judgement”.
Sabharwal, who has often highlighted the downside of the Indian government’s current lack of engagement with the Pakistani side in his writings, then proceeds to chart the history of Pakistan in the first part of his book. This includes the management – or rather the mismanagement – of the country’s economy and the crippling dependence on external patrons such as China. It also touches on the civil-military imbalance that continues to dog the country to this day, as is evident from the spectacular collapse of the Imran Khan government that was largely cobbled together with the help and machinations of the army. This part of the book is a sort of a handy primer on Pakistan’s past, flagging all the important milestones of recent decades.
But the book truly comes into its own when Sabharwal writes more about his own interactions with the Pakistani side at crucial moments in the relationship. For instance, he recalls being told in August 2010 by a senior interlocutor from the Pakistan Army that no action would be taken against LeT founder Hafiz Saeed in connection with the Mumbai attacks as there was “no evidence” against him. At the same time, the interlocutor assured Sabharwal that the attacks in Mumbai were “not authorised either by the [Pakistan] army or the ISI leadership”. At a closed-door meeting in Karachi, senior editors of a prominent media group urged “India to move beyond Mumbai” and resume dialogue, forcing Sabharwal to be blunt: “I asked my interlocutors to imagine, for the sake of argument, a situation involving 10 terrorists coming from Mumbai to Pakistan’s commercial capital Karachi to kill a large number of persons in cold blood, injure many more and paralyse the economy and normal life in the city for four days.”
Another interesting episode related by Sabharwal, which dates back to his stint as deputy high commissioner, is about accompanying former envoy Satish Chandra when he was called to Pakistan’s Foreign Office at 1am on May 28, 1998, to be given a message by then Pakistan foreign secretary Shamshad Ahmad that Islamabad had “credible information” about India attacking Pakistan’s nuclear facilities using “F-16 aircraft stationed at the Chennai airfield”. Ahmad said any such attack would be followed by “massive retaliation with devastating consequences”. When Chandra said India did not possess F-16 jets, Ahmad responded that the aircraft “could be Israeli”. Chandra and Sabharwal concluded in their personal assessment that Pakistan was on the verge of conducting nuclear tests – which ultimately happened on May 28 – and were “nervous about India attacking their testing site in the Chagai hills of Balochistan”.
At the conclusion of the book, Sabharwal offers several recommendations on the way forward in managing the India-Pakistan relationship. With no end in sight for the Pakistan Army’s stranglehold on politics, Sabharwal cautions that an Indian policy which ignore this constituency “would be unsound and not in India’s interest”. While reiterating his argument that the policy of isolating Pakistan globally has its limitations, Sabharwal calls for India to work with like-minded countries to continue exerting diplomatic pressure on Pakistan while maintaining a patient approach and not resorting to imprudent measures out of exasperation.