India and Pakistan are inching closer, writes Sri Raman from Chennai "Talks about talks" -- that has been a common description of the India-Pakistan dialogue underway since the beginning of 2004. After the meeting in New Delhi of the external affairs ministers of India and Pakistan, K Natwar Singh and Khurshid Mahmoud Kasuri respectively, on 5-6 September, the process may deserve a better description. The two countries prefer to avoid serious talks about the most important and intractable of issues between the two South Asian neighbours. Instead, they focus on small talk and publicity stunts that achieve very little on the ground save providing a semblance of bilateral conviviality. The Kashmir issue, which has ignited three India-Pakistan wars, stays outside the agenda of subjects for detailed discussion, though it is not officially unmentionable any more on such occasions. The achievement claimed for the process in this regard is that both sides agree on the need to discuss it as part of a "composite dialogue". "Composite" is supposed to mean a compromise on the part of Pakistan, which no longer insists on calling Kashmir "the core issue" on every conceivable occasion and forum. The inclusion of the "Jammu and Kashmir" issue, which names the India-administered state covering areas besides the Muslim-majority Himalayan Valley, is likewise said to indicate New Delhi's shedding of an old inhibition -- Jammu is Hindu dominated and Pakistan has no intention of annexing it. Neither side admits it has made any compromise, but both assert that an "advance" has been made. Both Singh and Kasuri, at the end of the talks, made known that they had not shied away from the prickly question of Kashmir. In their joint appearance before the media, however, the Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers made an evidently deliberate and striking departure from diplomatic practice, when it came to Kashmir. They made a public display of sharp differences on the issue, unusual for the decorously formal occasion. The Indian foreign minister chose to stress the need to end "cross-border terrorism" in Jammu and Kashmir, and his Pakistani counterpart responded with an equally undiplomatic reference to human rights violations in the Valley. New Delhi protests that a Kashmir-obsessed perception of Indo-Pakistani relations will only harm the significance and seriousness of bilateral talks. It will also damage the vast scope for improvement in India-Pakistan relations despite the imbroglio over war-torn Kashmir. India claims that it has, during the entire dialogue, placed as many as 72 proposals for normalisation between the two countries. To the Pakistani side as well as to some independent observers, these proposals, too, may appear a ploy to put off serious engagement concerning the most contentious issues between the countries. The proposals deal with people-to-people relations. Even according to many in the peace movements of India and Pakistan, these must precede and can pave the way for political solutions to the problems between the two nations. The impressive number of ideas put on the table, however, include crucial ones that relate to Kashmir, again. One of these, in fact, has served to illustrate the inseparable and inescapable links between political and people-to- people relations in contexts of this kind. The proposal for a bus link between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad has run into a serious roadblock for this reason. The former is the capital of what India calls Jammu and Kashmir and Pakistan considers India-occupied Kashmir. Muzaffarabad is the capital of what Islamabad calls Azad Kashmir and New Delhi dubs Pakistani- occupied Kashmir. The bus link will help build the atmosphere for talks aimed at a true Kashmir solution; it will deliver a message of real advance towards peace for the forcibly divided people of Kashmir. The proposal, however, could make no better progress than a broken-down bus. Differences on traveller's documents proved too powerful a brake. India pressed for the adoption of passports as the required document. Pakistan rejected the idea, as it would legitimise the Line of Control (LoC) as the international border in Kashmir between the two countries. The LoC, it may be recalled, was a result of the sub- continental war of 1971, which ended in the rout of Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh. The bus won't start before a compromise solution is found. According to some, the transparent kind of talks is still not taking place. But the international community and Western powers, especially Britain, the former colonial master of both India and Pakistan, are trying to play the role of mediator. Four days after the Singh-Kasuri talks, India's National Security Adviser J N Dixit and his Pakistani counterpart Tariq Aziz met in a hotel in the Indian holy city of Amritsar for what officials, innocent of irony, publicised widely as "secret talks". The two, it was further given out, discussed a "non-paper" (diplomatic terminology for a document that governments do not want to own up to) by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw (obviously batting for a baseball superpower) on Kashmir. Combined with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's call for "out-of-box" thinking on Kashmir, this has given rise to speculation about unconventional solutions to the problem. To believe the over-optimistic, even ideas of shared sovereignty are under consideration. The belief is unrealistic for two reasons. The first is the ground reality in Jammu and Kashmir, which has continued to witness clashes between militants and Indian security forces, claiming a heavy toll of human lives, all through the dialogue. The second is the prospect of a predictably virulent reaction to any settlement from the far right in India and the "jihadi" fundamentalists in Pakistan. The process, it has been promised, will be taken further when Manmohan Singh and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf meet on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session later this month. The success of the dialogue, however, will depend less on its level than on its theme.
