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EDITORIAL: This olive branch is for real

Talking to BBC Radio on Monday, General Pervez Musharraf has made yet another overture of peace to India. His Four Point Plan is this: hold talks, make Kashmir the focus, eliminate all solutions that are unacceptable to Pakistan, India and the Kashmiris, and find the win-win solution acceptable to all. He said he was prepared to remove troops from the Line of Control (LoC) if India withdrew its troops from the other side, and Pakistan was not to blame if, despite the ceasefire, there was insurgency in Held Kashmir. He was hopeful that there would be no repeat of Agra after the onset of the current sequence of CBMs between the two countries. He pointed to the special demonstration of flexibility on the side of Pakistan viz proposals made by India: the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service has been agreed to in principle and Pakistan had removed its conditionality on the resumption of air links. Mr Vajpayee is expected to ‘fly’ to Islamabad in the forthcoming 12th SAARC summit in January 2004.

After the address to the nation by Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Jamali last month, in which he offered a range of peace initiatives to India, things have moved fast. The two sides have agreed to air-links and over-flights while the issue of the railway link is expected to be resolved soon by India. The Samjhota Express remains the most-used medium of transport between India and Pakistan for families separated by a combination of history and geography. The bus service has not served as an alternative because there is a month-long waiting line for tickets on it. General Musharraf has even talked of reviving the long disrupted train link between Sindh and Rajasthan, which has forced families in Karachi to travel to Lahore whenever they have to visit India. Add to this the revival of the Bombay-Karachi ferry service agreed between the two countries and you have the promise of a breakthrough in peace initiatives in South Asia. As if to prove the point, the news of the opening of air travel was greeted by the Karachi stock exchange with record activity on a single day in the life of the market!

It is always easy to talk negatively about Indo-Pak relations because of the history of past failures to patch up. There is lack of hope and much cynicism involved in the point of view that sustains deadlock. Mr Vajpayee’s party is facing elections next year and may be relying on its anti-Pakistan slogans to win more votes than its main rival, the Congress-I. According to the cynic, the BJP government in India will not be sincere in its approach because peace doesn’t suit it at this moment. But surely positive-thinking analysts should have realised that the BJP’s anti-Muslim rhetoric has not succeeded since Kargil in 1999 and it has been steadily losing support in the provincial elections. In fact, there is a Hindutva fatigue creeping into the Indian polity. Recent coverage of India done by a private Pakistani TV channel amply proves this to be the case. If there was a hardline counterpoise to Mr Vajpayee’s diplomacy at Agra it may now have abated sufficiently to give the Indian statesman a chance to test the promise of General Musharraf.

What does General Musharraf promise, provided India agrees to talk on Kashmir? He says no solution will prevail if it is rejected by one of the three parties to the dispute. This goes beyond the content of the UN Security Council resolutions. This means that all sides to the dispute will have to show flexibility if they want the talks to continue. Since Pakistan is more insistent on the holding of talks it goes without saying that Pakistan will have to show more flexibility in its maximalist stance to prevent the talks from breaking down. Why shouldn’t Prime Minister Vajpayee be interested in putting General Musharraf to the test? It goes without saying that the talks on Kashmir will throw up many variants to the original UN-mandated solution. To take advantage of these variants in an environment of progressive normalisation, India must come forward. The stage is set far more congenially now than it was in 1999 when Mr Vajpayee came to Lahore and visited the Pakistan Resolution memorial. *

Hamza Alavi: greatness we rebuffed

Hamza Alavi, who died in Karachi Monday, was known as a leftwing intellectual to most of us. But in truth he was a rational philosopher in the tradition of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan who thought that Pakistan as a Muslim state could survive only if it read its Scripture rationally and interpreted it pluralistically. Mr Alavi therefore was a great supporter of the Quaid-e-Azam and wrote about him in his characteristic investigative manner, only to put off the religious establishment in Pakistan. His last great work was a series of articles on the impractical interpretation of the Quranic edict on interest (riba) by the Supreme Court of Pakistan. (Pakistan couldn’t implement it.) Ever the man of reason, he demonstrated once again how a religious state may hurt itself by being literalist.

From the Bohra community in Karachi, Mr Alavi in fact belonged to the world. That’s how he was saved from the ostracism of a narrow-minded society of restricted vision. While he was farming in Tanzania, he advanced the Marxist method of analysis by empirically identifying the mid-level farmer as the link to the urban proletariat. He came to Pakistan in 1968 and studied the ‘biradiri’ system in the local electoral process in a district of the Punjab. That study remains a classic to this day. If he hadn’t declined in health in recent years he could have been in the vanguard of the anti-capitalist movement whose importance we all recognise as we approach the year 2005 under the WTO. *

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