Explained Books: The complex India-Pak relationship, and ground realities to live with | Explained News,The Indian Express
The book has solid chapters on Pakistan's internal dynamics, including on the Army and the civil-military imbalance, the J&K question and the backchannel process, and the nuclear dimension in the India-Pakistan relationship.
India’s Pakistan Conundrum: Managing a Complex Relationship Sharat Sabharwal Routledge 238 pages Rs 995
Pakistan is in the midst of another spiralling political and economic crisis. Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, who took office in April after the opposition voted out the Imran Khan government, has to take tough economic decisions, which risk making the ruling combine unpopular, that too with just a year to go for elections. The former prime minister, meanwhile, is drawing huge crowds as he rails against an alleged U.S. conspiracy that unseated him. His bete noire, Army chief General Javed Qamar Bajwa, is due to retire in November. Who his successor will be may well decide the political course over the next five years. Meanwhile, even if the Sharif government had wanted to take some steps such as the restarting of trade ties with India, Khan’s reckless readiness to throw anything at Sharif and Bajwa has diminished the space once again for any improvement in India-Pakistan relations.
At this moment of great flux in India’s neighbour comes Sharat Sabharwal’s book, India’s Pakistan Conundrum (Routledge), to guide us through the country’s complexities. In a matter-of-fact manner, Sabharwal, who was Indian High Commissioner at Islamabad from 2009 to 2013, and served there in the 1990s too, explains why a Pakistan policy, “born out of anger and false notions of national honour can cause more harm than good” and “accepting the ground realities and working accordingly is sagacity, not pusillanimity”.
What are those ground realities? Sabharwal lays these out: yes, Pakistan is a dysfunctional state because of its civil-military imbalance and the the use of jihadi/terrorist groups. But Pakistan is here to stay, and any strategy premised on its disintegration is bound to be flawed, not least because the resulting chaos will not stop at the boundaries of that country. Plus it has nuclear weapons. An all-out war is not a great idea. India’s tactical military options to deter Pakistan’s terror machine (“surgical strikes”, Balakot for Pulwama) may carry only temporary impact. Coercion through trade or water does not work – in the first case, the volumes are too small, and the second could lead to unintended consequences for India where it is the lower riparian (as with China). With the snug China-Pakistan relationship, Pakistan is now part of India’s bigger China problem.
Sabharwal favours a pragmatic approach that stresses the region’s co-prosperity, in which Pakistan will realise it has more to gain by bettering itself economically than pulling India down, but is also clear that this realisation may take time to dawn on Pakistan, as its fragile self-identity — “not India” — comes in the way of rational decision-making and good sense. That is happening in India too, and Sabharwal has a word of advice on this: if you want to change Pakistan’s behaviour, there is work to be done at home, and this is not just about military strength and counter-terror capabilities. It is about denying Pakistan opportunities to fish in troubled waters by putting India’s own house in order, including in Jammu & Kashmir, rebuilding what used to be the broad national consensus on foreign policy that no longer exists, and avoiding competitive show of nastiness towards the neighbour.
Rating: 5