Pakistan’s ongoing multifaceted crisis shows little sign of abating, with none of the major institutions of the state demonstrating any interest or capacity to act together. For India, the question is how this affects relations with Pakistan both now and in the long-term.
A couple of common tropes need to be dismissed first. Though Pakistan is in dire straits and its future seems bleak today, it will likely recover and stabilise at some point. Yes, it had to be bailed out 13 times by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the last 35 years but calling Pakistan a ‘failed state’ is essentially meaningless unless the country itself splits apart. This does occasionally happen, as with the Soviet Union in 1991. Many other countries have also split up, some peacefully such as Czechoslovakia, and others very violently, such as Pakistan itself in 1971 or Yugoslavia. But many struggle on, barely afloat, for considerable periods. Think of Lebanon or even Somalia. So, short of the country falling apart, Pakistan’s current crisis is not particularly consequential for India outside of the human dimension, which is definitely a consideration.
Another common concern is Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. A nuclear-armed state going through such difficulties evokes concern but it is often not clear what the concern is. It is highly unlikely that nuclear weapons will be of any benefit to any of the political actors in Pakistan. Obviously, nuclear weapons cannot be used to settle domestic political disputes, nor can targeting India bring any resolution to the crisis inside Pakistan.
Similarly, the concern that rogue actors may gain control of nuclear weapons has been overblown for decades. Unless these are actors with no political objectives, it is unclear what they would do with nuclear weapons. Obviously, there are some, such as al Qaeda, which may have such millenarian visions but these are extremely rare. Moreover, nuclear weapons are the crown jewels of the Pakistan Army, and they can be expected to guard them zealously. The horrendous consequence of even a remote contingency such as this means we cannot be entirely sanguine about it but a measured assessment is still better than panic.
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Benefits to India
Beyond these issues, Pakistan’s current crises do benefit India in a couple of short-term ways. For one, it potentially gives India a breather for at least the immediate future from both the terrorist and a conventional war threat. The latter is particularly important because one of India’s growing concerns has to be the prospect of a two-front problem, with Pakistan threatening the Western border while China menaces the Tibet frontier. The two-front threat does not even require a full-scale war on two fronts. Rawalpindi can tie down a considerable amount of Indian ground and air force strength by actions far short of actual hostilities. In the context of heightened tensions with China, such moves can suffice to significantly reduce the level of military forces India could otherwise bring to bear on the Tibet front.
Pakistan’s current domestic political and economic challenges hopefully would prevent either their military or political leaders from engaging in risky external adventurism.
Over the longer term, India’s choices are severely limited. The state of India-Pakistan relations has largely been determined by Islamabad and this is not going to change much. The primary source of this is the imbalance of power between the two, which has been the source of Pakistan’s insecurity from the beginning. Pakistan has sought to correct this imbalance by spending a far higher proportion of its GDP on its military than India. But in absolute terms, it is still a far smaller military budget than India’s. As India’s economy has accelerated over the last two decades, the absolute gap between Indian and Pakistani defence spending has widened from three or four times to almost seven times.
Even if Pakistan comes out of its current economic crisis, this imbalance will not significantly change. This means that the fundamental source of Pakistan’s insecurity is likely to remain. As with most of India’s other neighbours, Pakistan’s insecurity is understandable. But its choices in dealing with it have often been self-defeating and deeply damaging to itself. But there is not a whole lot India can do to affect this.
Other ideological factors, such as religious animosity and the Partition, surely contributed to the deepening of Pakistan’s bitterness towards India. But Pakistan’s insecurity is also shared by India’s other smaller neighbours, even if in smaller quotients, which suggests that reasons beyond ideology are to blame. The reason for the smaller quotients may be that being even weaker than Pakistan, they had even fewer choices than Pakistan in dealing with India.
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Better choices
This insecurity and Pakistan’s constant effort to achieve some level of parity with India also drove it to make other choices, from a more central role for the Pakistan Army in politics to engaging in sub-conventional tactics such as terrorism to pursuing alliances with the US and China, and of course, nuclear weapons. Many of these choices, especially the disproportionate military spending, the role of the Army in politics, and the entanglement with extremists do appear to have played a role in bringing Pakistan to its current state.
India can hope that its various current crises will drive Pakistan to make better choices going forward because trying to keep pace—let alone catch up—with the much larger India is simply not a viable option for Pakistan. This is not Pakistan’s fault or any indication of its inadequacy but simply a recognition of the reality that India is relatively huge. This reality is not going to change unless India falls apart, which is not on the cards either.
But the quandary for India is that there is little that it can do to change Pakistan’s calculus other than hope for good sense across the border. There are some indicators of such change, with some even questioning the utility of Pakistan’s nuclear arms. But these are small shoots and it is probably too early to read much into this. If the creation of Bangladesh did not lead to fundamental questions about Pakistan’s choices, it is difficult to believe the current crises will.
The author is a professor of International Politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. He tweets @RRajagopalanJNU. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)