Rajnath Singh is discovering India-Pakistan civilisational ties

Even as India, Pakistan have seemed on the edge of war, their intelligence services have often sought to find space to de-escalate tensions and reduce risks for the two countries.

File photo of Defence Minister Rajnath Singh | AP/PTI

For both countries, though, Sindh provides a comforting—if only half-truth—contrast to the bitter narratives around which their engagement is woven. Trite as they might seem, Singh’s musings might just create the space needed for both countries to resume engagement on reducing the risks of the next war breaking out.

Elegantly dressed in an impeccably draped sari, a brilliant diamond tiara discreetly placed on her head, Crown Princess Sarvath El Hassan flitted from New York soirees to diplomatic dinners. The daughter of the eminent Kolkata-born Pakistani diplomat Muhammad Ikramullah and his wife, writer Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah, the Crown Princess had never played down the ethnic ties which shaped her life. Her uncle, Muhammad Hidayatullah, had served as India’s Chief Justice and vice-president. Her relatives included the educationists Badar-un-nissa Akhtar and Ibrahim Suhrawardy.

The previous year, 1987, India-Pakistan tensions had spiralled, amid large-scale exercises which sparked fears in Islamabad that India might be aiming to cut Sindh off from the country, as it had done in Bangladesh.

With the support of her husband, former Jordanian Crown Prince Hassan bin Talal—a personal friend to both former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his then Pakistani counterpart Benazir Bhutto—crafted an audacious plan for peace. The proposal was simple: could the Amman royals help the spy chiefs of India and Pakistan meet in secret, and see if there wasn’t a way forward?

The suggestion would set off a remarkable series of events that are still known to just a handful of key actors. The deal, which sought to trade off Pakistan’s existential anxieties in Sindh and Indian concerns about Punjab, remained almost unknown until 2016. 

Amazingly, the idea seems to have survived the Four-Day War, which demonstrated how quickly a future conflict could escalate to unmanageable levels. The recent car-bomb attacks in Delhi saw India’s leaders studiously avoid reference to Pakistan—learning from experience the perils of becoming prisoners of their own polemic.

Rajnath’s Karachi plan

Earlier this week, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh provoked ire—and some confusion—by invoking BJP veteran leader Lal Krishna Advani to assert that “Sindhi Hindus of his generation have not been able to come to terms with the loss of Sindh.” “Even Muslims in Sindh,” he went on, “consider the water of the Indus no less sacred than the Aab-e-Zamzam of Mecca.” “Today, the land of Sindh is not a part of India,” Singh said, “but as a civilisation, Sindh will always remain a part of us. Borders keep changing; who knows, perhaps that Sindh will one day return to India.”

For the most part, this sounded much like the nostalgic pablum dished out by Indian Uncle-jis—sometimes right before or after the claim that there are already too many Muslims in India. There is, however, some reason to suspect that the defence minister might not have lapsing into maudlin sentimentalism.

There have been multiple claims that, just weeks after a ceasefire went into place on the Line of Control (LoC) in 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had considered making a political move at détente. The visit, so accounts claim, was to culminate at the Hinglaj Mata temple, located in a narrow gorge in the Lyari River, which has become the largest Hindu pilgrimage site in Pakistan. This was to have been followed by an agreement between PM Modi and Prime Minister Imran Khan to freeze the conflict over Kashmir for 20 years.

Little imagination is needed to see why this apparently preposterous claim—which has, notably, not been denied by either side—might hew close to the truth.

Even as India and Pakistan have seemed on the edge of war, their intelligence services have often sought to find space to de-escalate tensions and reduce risks for the two countries. Is Singh opening the way for a conversation that pulls both New Delhi and Islamabad back from the brink they almost reached in the Four-Day War earlier this year?

The secret dialogue

To attempt an answer to that question, we have to go back to the conversation Princess Sarvath began. From mid-1987, it had become clear that the Soviet Union had determined to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan. This worried both Islamabad and New Delhi, although for different reasons. Then PM Rajiv, as declassified correspondence reveals, was concerned that this might fuel Islamist political movements across the region. General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan’s military ruler, feared Western aid would dry up.

Crown Princess Sarvath’s proposals for dialogue, thus, came at just the right time. Among the key lessons Zia and Rajiv had learned, scholar Ashley Tellis has observed, was that the top leadership of adversarial countries had to maintain direct contact, or cede authority to the professional pessimists in the intelligence services and militaries.

Following secret meetings in Amman and later near Geneva, former RAW chief AN Verma has written, he and ISI chief Lieutenant-General Hamid Gul drew up top-secret plans to disengage troops at the Siachen Glacier, and, as a gesture of goodwill, to surrender four Sikh Indian Army soldiers who had claimed asylum in Pakistan after the storming of the Golden Temple.

The case of explosives-concealing mangoes that is reputed to have caused General Zia’s death in 1988 also blew up the dialogue, though. There were no records in Pakistan’s diplomatic services of the Siachen deal, nor of the secret meeting.

From the mid-1980s, analyst Tayyab Ali Shah has written, Karachi began to degenerate into a Hobbesian hell of criminal syndicates, jihadists, armed political groups like the Muttahida Quami Movement and the ethnic-Pashtun Awami National Party. Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, former RAW officer B Raman noted, had a pithy insight into the situation: “You are playing the Sikh card against India. They have started playing the Sindh card against us. Stop using the Sikh card and hand over to India all the Sikh leaders living in Pakistan.”

Lieutenant-General Hamid Gul, the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, pushed back. Keeping Punjab destabilised, he argued, gave the Pakistan Army the equivalent of two extra divisions of troops at no high cost.

The costs of this conflict, though, led former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar to propose a fresh round of secret talks at the end of 1990. RAW chief GS Bajpai and his ISI counterpart Lieutenant-General Asad Durrani met a few weeks later at a hotel in Singapore. The discussions, this time,  Raman records, deadlocked. Durrani blamed India for funding terrorism by both Mohajir groups and the MQM in Sindh, while denying any responsibility for terrorism directed at India.

Talking while fighting

Even though crises littered the course of decades to come, India and Pakistan continued to talk in secret. Following Kargil, military ruler General Pervez Musharraf escalated violence in Kashmir. After the 2001 Parliament House terrorist attack, former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee threatened military retaliation only, scholar Arzan Tarapore has written, to discover “the parlous state of Indian Army readiness”. Faced with the uncertain outcomes of war, Vajpayee eventually backed down.

Musharraf, too, discovered he had no cause to exult. Lieutenant-General Moinuddin Haider, who served as interior minister under Musharraf, recorded that the cost of sustained conflict with India was hollowing out Pakistan’s economy.

In late 2007, former PM Manmohan Singh’s secret envoy Satinder Lambah said that the two countries agreed on a four-point formula that froze the LoC as a border—but gave both sides of Kashmir a high level of autonomy. The agreement, however, collapsed after the 26/11 attacks. Led by the diplomats Satinder Lambah and Tariq Aziz, India and Pakistan hammered out a four-point plan on Kashmir, essentially combining the territorial status quo with some enhancement in federal autonomy for both sides.

This plan was killed off by the 26/11 attacks, which some believe to have been an act of sabotage directed at Musharraf by his own military. However, the peacemaking continued under Modi. Late in 2015, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval met his counterpart, Nasir Janjua, in Bangkok. The meeting was followed by a dramatic visit by Modi to Lahore to greet then-PM Nawaz Sharif on the occasion of his granddaughter’s wedding.

Leading up to the Pulwama crisis of 2018, ISI officer Major-General Sahibzada Isfandiyar Pataudi and RAW’s R Kumar met to discuss confidence-building measures. After the crisis, February 2021, Doval secretly met with then-ISI chief Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed to hammer out terms for the LoC ceasefire.

These talks failed again, as the Four-Day War illustrates—but as in each previous crisis, it is possible both sides will reach out again.

Little steps toward approchement were evident before the Four-Day War. Pilgrims from Sindh visited the Ram Temple in Ayodhya last year.

The claims that Sindh was a unique communal melting pot will be treated with scepticism by professional historians. The build-up to Partition saw a long, slow splintering of communities, with savage riots breaking out in 1927 and 1938, historian Asma Faiz has recorded. And Sindhi nationalist movements remain part of the region’s landscape, but bloody repression and internal division have weakened them. The real threats to Pakistan come from its northern borderlands, not the crowded streets of Karachi.

For both countries, though, Sindh provides a comforting—if only half-truth—contrast to the bitter narratives around which their engagement is woven. Trite as they might seem, Singh’s musings might just create the space needed for both countries to resume engagement on reducing the risks of the next war breaking out.

Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.

(Edited by Saptak Datta)