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'Talk, but don't expect Kashmir solution'

Ajit Jain
India Abroad Correspondent in Toronto

There's no harm in keeping the lines of communication open between India and Pakistan, even though a negotiated settlement of the Kashmir issue seems bleak, an Indo-Canadian expert on South Asia has said.

"It is good to stay in touch and find out how General Pervez Musharraf's thinking is working. Talk is better than war," said Ashok Kapoor, head of the political science department at the University of Waterloo, Ontario. Prof Kapoor has written extensively on India-Pakistan relations, including the 'Islamic bomb'.

He, however, warned against any high expectations from the forthcoming meeting between Indian Prime Minister A B Vajpayee and the Pakistani military ruler.

"There is no harm in finding out how the other person's mind is working, [but] beyond that I am not sure there can be a negotiated solution of the Kashmir issue," he said. "The Line of Control is the solution, but Pakistan is not ready to accept that because of internal politics. They want the whole of the valley."

Questions need to be asked not just about Kashmir but about the role of the Pakistani Army and the Inter-Services Intelligence in India's Northeast. The ISI is very active in the region, while the Pakistani Navy has been making port calls in Bangladesh and Burma, he added.

Kapoor said the three main threads of India-Pakistan relations were: diplomatic, which is bilateral dialogue; the active support and dangerous meddling of Pakistan in Indian border areas; and its strong support to Bangladesh on the ground and the Pakistani Navy's activities in the Bay of Bengal. These three threads also "dovetail into Chinese" interests, he felt.

The Vajpayee-Musharraf meeting will cover only the first thread, whereas "nothing will happen" vis-à-vis the other threads, (the ISI's support for insurgency in the Northeast and Bangladesh, its extensive network even in central Asia and the Pakistani Navy's activities in the Bay of Bengal), he predicts.

India and Pakistan are going back to the Lahore bus diplomacy. But that was pre-Kargil, whereas in the next meeting, Musharraf will participate as the architect of Kargil incursion, a fact he hasn't so far denied, Kapoor asserted.

Asked why Vajpayee has agreed to invite Musharraf after initially refusing to do so, Kapoor felt that Home Minister Lal Kishenchand Advani's Kashmir policy had failed, and the issue was now being handled by K C Pant and Vajpayee. The invitation to Musharraf was due to Pant's initiative, he said.

It could also be result of developments in Afghanistan, he added, pointing out that the Pakistani Army is deeply involved in the affairs of the Taleban and there is a Russian report saying 3,000 Pakistani army personnel are in Afghanistan training and arming the fundamentalist regime.

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