Alexei Kosygin’s phone finally rang, and an apologetic Kremlin aide came on the line: The call meant to save a billion lives hadn’t gone through, he explained, because a telephone operator in Beijing had refused to connect to China’s chairman, Mao Zedong, and showered invectives before hanging up. Kosygin ordered his diplomats in Beijing to begin an—unsuccessful—hunt for Mao’s direct number. “Either kill the tiger or be eaten by him,” Mao had said in a famous 1949 speech, a message that ignoring Kosygin’s desperate calls was meant to underline.
The previous week, on 15 March 1969, People’s Liberation Army troops had occupied the ice-bound Soviet island of Damansky, sparking off ferocious fighting. Fears of escalation grew, raising the prospect that China might end up using its new medium-range ballistic missiles—armed with the only nuclear warhead ever flight-tested over populated areas.
For centuries, leaders have used not talking as a means of crisis communication, just as often as dialogue. Last month, India’s former High Commissioner to Islamabad, Ajay Bisaria, revealed in his memoirs that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is also skilled at communicating by not picking up the phone. Even as panic grew in Pakistan that India was planning missile strikes during the Balakot crisis—a move that would have ratcheted up the crisis—the Prime Minister declined a midnight call from his counterpart Imran Khan.
Earlier, Modi himself said a night of slaughter—“qatl ki raat”—would have ensued if Pakistan had failed to agree to the release of captured Indian Air Force pilot Abhinandan Varthaman that day.
Also read: Army will write the final word on Pakistan election. But political instability is certain
To talk or not to talk?
Ever since that night, New Delhi has mostly stonewalled Islamabad’s efforts to begin talking again. Even though some covert dialogue has taken place, and the two armies have maintained a ceasefire on the Line of Control, India has rejected Pakistan’s appeals for even minor concessions on Kashmir. Former Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s call for negotiations received little hearing in Delhi.
Following this week’s rigging-tainted elections in Pakistan, though, Pakistan will get a new government, and a new Prime Minister. PM Modi will get calls—and he will have to make calls on how he wants to address the new landscape.
Little imagination is needed to understand why New Delhi is so reluctant to talk. The road from Lahore led on to Kargil, and the 2001 attack on Parliament House in New Delhi. Like Manmohan Singh on 26/11, Modi received Pathankot and Uri before Balakot. The Generals systematically littered mines on the road to peace.
Twenty-four hours after India’s strikes on Balakot, Lieutenant General Tariq Khan—later, among Imran’s most consistent advocates among former military commanders—argued for retaliation.
Each Indian cross-border strike, Gen Khan noted eroded “our position of deterring war through our nuclear capability.” That, in turn, means “we become more and more vulnerable to an asymmetric conventional threat”. Thus, Gen Khan went on, “Our response should be to escalate and push the envelope of hostilities so that nuclear war is a likely outcome.”
India, Khan argued, “simply will not go down this road”: As the larger, richer state, it has more to lose in an all-out conflict.
Ever since 2001, though, Pakistani Generals have known this policy is becoming ever more unsustainable. In 1970, the GDP of Pakistan and India were near-identical; today, India’s GDP is eight times that of Pakistan. Even India’s per-capital GDP, despite its much larger population, is 50 per cent higher than that of Pakistan. The Pakistan Army’s ability to spend money on itself is diminishing, analysts Jon Grevatt and Andrew McDonald have noted.
The resilient electoral performance of Imran Khan, despite the deck being stacked against him, will have made clear to Generals the costs of devouring resources as the polity reels amidst crisis.
As early as 2002, when General Pervez Musharraf launched a secret peace process in Kashmir with Prime Minister Vajpayee, he had come to understand that Pakistan could not bear the costs of crisis. Lieutenant General Moinuddin Haider and Lieutenant General Javed Qazi, scholar George Perkovich notes, told Musharraf investors would simply not come to a Pakistan suffused with crisis.
Even though the Pakistan Army successfully deterred India with conventional attack, it entered into the first ceasefire on the Line of Control, shutting the tap on infiltration and setting the stage for a long decline of violence in Kashmir.
Also read: Should Nawaz Sharif risk negotiating a govt? Pakistanis’ message via Imran Khan is clear
Fundamental changes?
Even if the India-Pakistan relationship has bitter hostility baked into it, it’s served drenched in a sauce of mawkish sentimentalism: The treacly poetry and ecstatic which overlaid Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s 1999 visit to Pakistan, or Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s description of the India-Pakistan peace process as “irreversible” three years before 26/11 are examples. Even Modi, famously, arrived impromptu for Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s granddaughter’s wedding, armed with a gift of a hot-pink turban, signifying brotherhood.
The truth, however, is that this apparent sentimentalism conceals hard-nosed realism: Talking to Pakistan has yielded multiple reductions in violence, whether after 2003 or 2021. Even though the peace on the Line of Control might have been imperfect, it’s better than crisis.
For India, the truth is that peace with Pakistan will allow scaling back its substantial economic commitment to securing its military and counter-insurgency posture in Kashmir. It will free up resources to deal with the challenge from China.
The China-Russia crisis of 1969 is a useful prism for policy-makers in both Islamabad and New Delhi to consider, as they look at the path forward.
For Pakistan, the holds out instructive lessons on the pointlessness of games of bluff. The Chinese posture was just performance theatre intended to deter the Soviets, the United States intelligence analyst Thomas Hughes recorded in a classified note. “The growing danger,” he added, “is that Peking might be miscalculating and that the tactics meant to deter wider conflict with the Soviets will, in fact, bring it on.”
The 1969 crisis should teach India, similarly, about the limits of force. The Soviet Union was militarily and economically superior to China in all respects. Finally, Russia was deterred by the reality that defeating China would have created an anarchic, fractured China that posed even more of a threat to Russia than the status quo.
Also read: Bajwa worked for peace with India till his retirement. Balakot, Pulwama were black swan events
The Generals’ Islamic State
There’s no telling, of course, how deep the changes in Pakistan’s army are, or if they will revive under any eventual changes in Pakistan’s economic fortunes. The army, as the eminent scholar C Christine Fair has argued, is an epistemic community—a group which is bound together by inherited knowledge. Inside Pakistan’s army, which drew its legitimacy by being a praetorian guard of Islam against the so-called Hindu state next door, normalisation with India was cast as an existential threat
The roots of this thinking lie in the late 1940s, when Pakistan army officers fought alongside tribal irregulars in an effort to seize Kashmir. Brigadier Akbar Khan, who led the campaign, believed the war for Kashmir had been betrayed by an effete political leadership. Brigadier Akbar was later arrested for attempting to stage a coup d’état.
Following religious rioting in 1953, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan found himself ceding a growing share of power to General Ayub Khan with the army casting itself as a modernising institution. The famous scholar Samuel Huntington hailed General Ayub’s Basic Democracy project—which restricted electoral franchise to side-step East Pakistani electoral power, and rule instead with the backing of West Pakistan’s landed élites—as a “prerequisite of political stability in a modernising country”. Instead, it was to end up empowering the Islamists.
Following its very first elections with universal franchise, held in 1970, the country disintegrated, with Bangladesh seceding. Islam became a seductive ideological force, promising to restore the founding values of the country. In 1973, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto—who played a key role in precipitating two wars with India—succumbed to Islamist pressure, and passed a new Constitution which decreed that “sovereignty over the entire Universe belongs to Almighty Allah alone”.
The regime of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq built the state around these ideas. Anti-India positions flowed from jihadism. General Zia, Fair notes, energetically advocated Brigadier SK Malik’s pro-jihad book, The Quranic Conception of War, noting its contribution to the “understanding that we jointly seek as citizens of an Islamic state”.
Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto chose not to roll back the religious legislation; in 1998, her successor, Nawaz Sharif, even considered legislation that would have declared him the Amir ul-momineen, or Commander of the Faithful — a title used by the medieval Caliphs, and Taliban founder-leader Mullah Muhammad Omar.
Those ideas have lived on, through successive governments. Even now, the Pakistan Army continues to completely dismantle its safe-haven and patronage of some terrorist groups.
Learning lessons from the past, India has become cautious about making peace with Pakistan. There’s one thing that will be worse, though, which is war.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)
India should never talk with Pakistan. A non serious nation.
India should never talk to Pakistan. Pakistan has no one centralized power to talk. Did you forget the Pulwama by Imran. India should keep lobbying to list Pakistan in Gray list of Terrorism.