| Vol. XVII, No. 36

he October 8 earthquake provided a great opportunity to the normalisation process between Pakistan and India but it might just have been sacrificed at the altar of bureaucratised mindsets. Consider.

India offered Pakistan help with personnel and helicopters but Islamabad declined politely. Pakistan deemed the offer beyond its comfort level because of two interlocked factors.

One relates to Pakistan’s internal politics. The government, which already lacks political legitimacy, has come under the stick for not responding to the crisis quickly enough. The second pertains to how Pakistan and India look at each other despite normalisation. Pakistan still perceives India as the primary security threat; India returns the favour. These responses have been institutionalised.

Taking these in reverse, Pakistan politely refused the offer of helicopters and Indian personnel on the ground in its part of Kashmir because (a) India would have refused a similar offer by Pakistan and (b) Indian army helicopters flying over Azad Kashmir could reconnoitre the area and collect crucial intelligence about ORBAT (order of battle) and other strategic assets that must remain secret from India.

There are many problems with both arguments. Yes, India would have refused any Pakistani offer of helicopters and personnel. But that is precisely the problem. Must we bind our policy responses in the Indian straitjacket and by doing so lose our freedom of movement and innovation? Is it possible to break the cycle and surprise the bounded rationality on the other side?

The second argument seems weightier but may not be so in reality. First, it is quite absurd to think that India already does not have an intelligence network in the area and is not using humint (human intelligence) and sigint (signal intelligence) to gather information. Second, the two sides have fought three-and-half wars in this area and both know the terrain as well as each other’s capabilities and likely plans very well. There is a limit to innovating operational plans in a terrain that is so well known to both sides. Third, we have the US Chinooks flying in and out of the area and the Americans, with their equipment and resources, are much better placed to recce the area and pick up intelligence on our assets, whatever their nature might be, than the Indians.

In a semi-facetious manner one could stretch the point to argue that given the growing strategic relations between India and the US, the information we are presumably denying India could, at some point in the future, be passed on to it by the Americans. If security is indeed the factor guiding the policy of keeping the Indians out of the area, then a similar policy should have applied to the Americans also. Remember this is an area where there presumably are jihadi training camps and the Americans could even pick up the Al Qaeda spoor. As for the argument about the disputed nature of the region, the nature of the dispute or Pakistan’s control of the area would hardly be diluted just because Indian personnel helped rescue Pakistanis.

The fact is that these arguments are begotten of the institutional mindset that has evolved over more than five decades. It is true of both states. India has refused to share seismic data with Pakistan because it thinks that such data could be used by Pakistan to identify the location of any future nuclear test(s). India is also reluctant to join the Global Seismographic Network run by the Washington-based IRIS (Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology) consortium that monitors earthquakes at 128 stations worldwide. Neither India nor Pakistan is plugged into IRIS.

All this is despite the fact that Pakistan badly needs helicopters and there are still many areas where rescue workers and relief supplies have not reached. Given the magnitude of the crisis – according to WHO estimates, the quake has affected more than 3 million people which makes it a bigger calamity than the December 2004 tsunami which hit 11 littoral states of the Indian Ocean and displaced 1.5 million people – that Pakistan needs help from wherever it can come.

In the middle of this came General Pervez Musharraf’s statement about opening the Line of Control. An Indian team is to visit Pakistan on October 29 to work out the modalities of how it is to be done. India, for its part, has tried to upstage Pakistan by opening the line at three points so that survivors from AJK who still have not been provided relief could cross over. The Indian government is rushing medical supplies and other relief goods at the three points to “help” these people.

This is an exercise at public relations. On the Pakistani side also, it is difficult to figure out what the opening of the Line would mean in the wake of refusal to entertain Indian help on the ground or from the air. One argument is that the opening of the Line has a symbolic value. Even if this were accepted, it is hard to imagine what it would signify in practical terms without changing the existing paradigm.

At this juncture one also needs to look at the factor of internal politics. The political and religio-political opposition are arrayed against Musharraf and his party, the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Q, and its allies. The policy of keeping the regular political parties completely out of the political arena has resulted in vertical polarisation. The opposition knows that the Q-League has no real political clout without Musharraf’s patronage. The thrust fault that has caused the quake has also made the political fault active. Dour-faced officials and ministers can be seen on TV channels trying to inform the public that the government is doing everything it can to mitigate the misery of the survivors. A new directive embargoes channels from criticising official relief efforts. The opposition has already opposed the induction of NATO troops in the quake-stricken areas. It would be very difficult for the Musharraf government to sell the idea of Indian help beyond the current levels.

The army, as a group, has done commendable work. Yet, it has drawn flak from the people because Musharraf’s system has placed it in the centre of the country’s politics. This is unfortunate because under a civilian government, it would have extracted praise for its efforts. The structural flaws in the system are now working to its disadvantage. Given the internal dynamics, the institutional bias evinced by both sides against each other, and in this case, the dialectic between the two will not allow Islamabad to effect any major change in relation to India.

It would stretch optimism to think in terms of joint disaster management at this juncture or setting up a mechanism to address any future natural calamities jointly, although this kind of close cooperation is exactly what could have given a quantum jump to normalisation. Indeed, it would be a plus if the two sides could even agree to share seismic data and establish a cooperative system for early warning of such disasters. Beyond this would be the triumph of hope over experience.

Parts of this article were originally written for the Indian Express