He came, he scorned, he left

Rehman Malik enjoys the reputation of being a loudmouth who speaks without thought and thinks without substance. Yet, because he is Pakistan’s Interior Minister, he has to be considered with some amount of seriousness. It’s time we stopped treating him with kid gloves

It has been some days since  Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik ended his disastrous three-day trip to India, but the bitter aftertaste from his visit continues to linger. A delegation led by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs was expected to travel to Islamabad on December 19 — a tentative date agreed upon by both Indian and Pakistani officials — to finalise the details of a Pakistani Judicial Commission’s second visit to India to cross-examine key witnesses in the 26/11 terror case. But December 19 has come and gone without so much as an acknowledgment from the Pakistani side — even though it was Mr Malik who had insisted, while he was in India, that the commission be allowed to visit at the earliest. In fact, he had even said that the immediacy of the commission’s visit was directly related to how quickly the 26/11 trial could be concluded in Rawalpindi. Yet, once back in his country, Mr Malik seems to have all but forgotten about the promises made.

But then again, as India’s political establishment has recently learnt, the Pakistani Minister may be a man of many words but scarcely is he a man who keeps his word. Ask Union Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde who very graciously hosted his Pakistani counterpart only to find out that the latter had taken him for a jolly good ride. And so, it would be that a day after Mr Malik left this country, Mr Shinde found himself complaining to Parliament that the documents he received from the Pakistani Minister pertaining to the multiple arrests of 26/11 mastermind Hafiz Saeed were essentially a smokescreen. The documents were presented to New Delhi to buttress Pakistan’s argument that it had all the intentions in the world to punish that extremist but could not do so given the crying lack of evidence. Consequently, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa’ah chief had to be let off by Pakistani authorities even after he had been arrested. But on closer scrutiny, it has now become clear that the three Hafiz Saeed arrests that Mr Malik had been gloating about had absolutely no connection with the 26/11 charges. That the Pakistanis believed that they could pull such a trick on New Delhi and still get away with it does speak volumes. Indeed, it is against this background that Mr Malik’s slew of blood-curdling remarks, made during the course of his visit, that offended Indian sensibilities across the board, must be viewed.

The Pakistani Minister fired his opening salvo pretty much the moment he landed on Indian soil, when he dismissed India’s forensic evidence that clearly points to the role of members of the Pakistani establishment, particularly the ISI, in the 26/11 attacks. Then, he had the gall to claim that Kargil hero Captain Saurabh Kalia died due to bad weather in the Himalayas. But even before one could swallow this affront, Mr Malik callously dropped the B-bomb, comparing the demolition of the Babri Masjid to the 26/11 carnage. Eventually, of course, he tried to muddy the waters by claiming that he had said nothing of the sort and it was the big bad media that tried to twist his statement. But still, coming from the representative of a country where minorities are routinely targeted, abducted, raped and killed; where their places of worship are destroyed with gay abandon without the state lifting so much as a finger to stop the atrocities, the Babri Masjid snub was a bit rich — not to mention that, shameful as it may have been, the episode was and remains an internal matter for India in which Pakistan has no business to poke its nose.

But the Minister had saved the best for the last. And so it was on the ultimate day of his visit that Mr Malik claimed that Zabiuddin Ansari alias Abu Jundal, the alleged handler of the 26/11 terrorists who was earlier this year deported from Saudi Arabia, was in fact an agent of an elite Indian intelligence agency. Yet again, the statement was so absurd that it would have been almost farcical had it not been so downright appalling.

One way of responding to this situation is to simply dismiss Mr Malik’s statements as the nonsensical ranting of a loudmouth. He is, after all, a habitual offender and has been mocked often even in his own country for putting his foot in his mouth. For instance, when the Sri Lankan team came under attack in Pakistan, Mr Malik promptly placed the blame on Colombo’s doorstep. Similarly, last year he even thanked the Taliban for not killing Shias during Muharram celebrations — which ironically is not that much different from his Indian counterpart addressing Hafiz Saeed with the honorific ‘Mr’ and ‘Shri’ or for that matter the Congress’s spokesman Digvijaya Singh referring to the world’s most wanted terrorist as ‘Osamaji’.

However, the point here is not just that India too has its own fair share of motormouths and court jesters but that Mr Malik’s statements, no matter how stupid, should not be discarded as such. For, let us not forget that even if they were supposedly off-the-cuff remarks, the utterances were entirely in keeping with the official Pakistani strategy of stonewalling all efforts to bring the perpetrators of 26/11 to justice. It is in this context then that India’s own insipid response to Mr Malik’s volley of untruths and false statements must be questioned.

First, why was he even allowed to make these statements? Second, why was there no strong official rebuttal to his remarks from the Indian establishment? Third, why did the mainstream media not do a better job of holding Mr Malik accountable for his statements?

For instance, when Mr Malik kept repeating ad nauseam that Ajmal Kasab’s statements were not enough to nail Hafiz Saeed, there was no counter-mention of the reams of evidence that had emerged from the trials of terrorist head hunters David Headley and Tahawwur Rana in the US which also pointed to the role of Hafiz Saeed and that of ISI officials in the 26/11 terror attack.

A pliant media (with some exceptions) and India’s meek officialdom, too busy bending over backwards to appease a visiting dignitary, could not be bothered to ask if the Pakistani Government had any plans to act on the sworn affidavits of Headley and Rana in the Chicago Court, even if it trashed Ajmal Kasab’s testimony in India.

Similarly, when Mr Malik claimed that India had not taken up with Pakistan the Captain Saurabh Kalia case until now, his false narrative went unchallenged. In fact, India has on at least three occasions mentioned the case at bilateral meetings. Moreover, when the matter was first discussed during the Kargil conflict, the Pakistani Government had at that time refused to take any responsibility, claiming instead that it was the ‘mujahideens’ and not the Pakistani Army that had taken Kargil Heights.

But now that Islamabad has changed its stance and both former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and former President Pervez Musharraf agree that the Army was indeed involved, the question is: Will Mr Malik now ask members of the Northern Light Infantry, which were deployed in Kargil, for the facts — and stop distorting the truth?

(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on December 20, 2012.)

The myth of burger diplomacy

Thomas Friedman had once famously said that no two countries that have McDonalds have ever gone to war against each. But that was perhaps before the Kargil War. Democracy does not always translate into peace

The notion of a certain kind of Government being able to promote peace is, in the least, a very tantalising one. Little wonder then that policy makers in recent times, especially in the more deeply democratic Western world, have been particularly fascinated by the proposition that democracies do not fight one another. On the surface, this seems to provide a one-stop solution to global conflict, implying that a kind of “perpetual peace”, as described by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his 1795 landmark essay, ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’, may prevail if there were only democracies in the world.

However, since such an idea becomes oft-abused to legitimise actions against non-democratic nations — think of the Iraq war or even the aerial campaign against Libya — it is imperative to critically analyse such a statement and acknowledge the fact that a number of qualifications need to be taken into consideration before one can celebrate the inherent virtues of democratic governance.

First on the list is the matter of definitions. What is democracy? What is peace? Is the absence of war an indication of peace? What is war? What about other forms of violence and conflict? However, there are no consistent and universal definitions of these phenomena — no, not even within academia. Mostly, both political scientists and policy-makers just devise their own set of requirements to suit their research designs or strategic compulsions.

In fact, as Ido Oren describes in his seminal work, the term ‘democracy’ is highly subjective and over the years, has changed significantly to refer essentially to other members of the ‘in-group’. In other words, for American policy makers for instance, democratic nations at any given time are those nations with whom the US has friendly relations at that time.

Similarly, there are problems with understanding the concept of peace. The democratic peace literature has a realist take on the matter — meaning, peace is the absence of war. This definition thus excludes all other forms of violence, such as economic war which can be just as destructive, military interventions, covert operations, and even civil wars. Consequently, it provides for with only half the information and a false impression. For instance, India and Pakistan may not be engaged in ‘war’ right now, but relations between the two nuclear-armed neighbours are surely not peaceful.

Also, it is interesting to note that while democracies may be relatively less prone to fighting one another, they show no such tendencies towards non-democracies (think of the war in Afghanistan or even the kind of defensive position that the US has taken against autocratic China) — although some believe that while at war, they are less severely violent. Thus it is clearly evident that the idea of monadic peace — that democracies simply by themselves are more peaceful in nature — is a myth.

Interestingly, it may also be mentioned that in some cases even autocratic dyads — a set of two autocratic nations — are more peaceful in their foreign relations than would be expected. Think of Russia and China and how the countries have not only maintained cordial relations with each other but have also teamed up on the global forum to present an intimidating force.  This further negates the assumption that there is something about democratic regimes in particular that makes them more peaceful towards each other — since it may be said that similar regime types are overall less prone to go to war with each other.

Another gaping hole in the democratic peace argument is the equally vague idea of an established democracy versus a weak democracy. Neither of these terms is well-defined and both are very fluid and can easily include or exclude a vast number of nations

A study of how the democratic peace proposition finds reflection in South Asia brings out the above point better. Unlike the West, South Asia suffers from chronic instability, extreme poverty and underdevelopment. Yet, it shares the western ideal of economic liberalisation and since the 1990s, it has been a largely democratic region wherein India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka have all had some form of democratic Government, for the most part. In other words, all these countries have had more than one political party or candidate, elections have been held here in which the citizens have participated and through which, they have elected their leaders and finally, citizens have some basic political and civil rights.

However, it is also an established fact that, though elections may be held in all these countries, some, such as Pakistan and Bangladesh, do not always provide their citizens with the necessary constitutional, civil and political rights, therefore, taking away from it crucial aspects of democratic governance, as Kant would imagine.

An important assumption of the democratic peace proposition is that democracies would share their democratic norms and values with other democracies, and this in turn would be a determining factor in preventing war. In South Asia, however, this has not been the case. Neighbouring democracies have not been able to participate in sharing similar norms but have instead allowed their relations to be clouded by mistrust and suspicion which came about because of their violent and bloody historical past. Both Pakistan and Bangladesh believe that India has expansionist motives, while India is suspicious of both for brewing anti-India sentiment. Will democratic peace succeed in such an environment?

Two other factors that are believed to constrain democracies from going to war include the system of checks and balances that makes it significantly difficult for a small group of executive members to make an unpopular move, and also the fact that the Government is answerable to its people. However, what happens when the people don’t really care about foreign policy decisions — quite like in the West, foreign affairs does not figure high on the list of electoral priorities for South Asians either.

At the same time, foreign policy decisions are also increasingly made by a small group of Ministers or leaders, like members of a kitchen cabinet. Good examples of this situation are the tenures of Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi, in India; the UNP Government in Sri Lanka as it negotiated the Indo-Sri Lankan Accords of 1987 and the complicated role of the military in Pakistani foreign and domestic affairs. Therefore, given the fact that democratic institutions do not necessarily work well in these countries, does South Asia have a chance at democratic peace?

Another area of interest with regard to the democratic peace theory is economic interdependence. Proponents of the theory argue that democracies that have economic ties with one another are less prone to fight each other since that would result in mutual trade loss.

In fact, Thomas Friedman had once famously said that no two countries that have McDonalds have ever warred against each other. But that was before the Kargil War.

(This article was published in the Op-ed section of The Pioneer on August 9, 2012.)