This is the last day of dictatorship,” declared Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) chief Asif Ali Zardari, who is expected to lead the democratic coalition government in Pakistan (meanwhile, Yusuf Raza Gillani has been named the Prime Minister), as per the understanding reached with Nawaz Sharif of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), after 342 parliamentarians were sworn in out of the total of 348 members elected on Monday last. A discordant note, however, was struck by the apprehension of a man carrying a pistol within the parliament premises just before the ceremony began. It is a mystery how he had got in, despite stringent security arrangements. The durability of the newly established democracy is also debatable.

David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, once wrote a famous essay on the persistent belief of people in miracles. He came to the conclusion after careful deliberation that “it is more probable the evidence is false, than that the miracles are true.” The euphoria that prevails at present about the resurgence of democracy in that country, while it is welcome, needs to be viewed therefore with a great deal of caution. It should also be noted that out of 60 years or so that Pakistan has existed as an independent entity, it has functioned for the major period under one or the other dictator.

What is also significant is that ever since its coming into being, Pakistan has declared herself to be an Islamic State and been challenging the legal validity of the partition mandated by the Indian Independence Act passed by the British Parliament, under which the Indian sub-continent was divided on religious lines. It should also be remembered that Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, who had insisted on the religious basis of the partition, and bitterly described the territory granted under the partition as a “truncated, moth-eaten travesty!” Ironically thereafter, East Pakistan too had broken away in 1971 from Pakistan and Bangladesh had become independent, becoming the second largest Islamic country in terms of its population with Indonesia taking the first place.

Following the swearing-in ceremony in Islamabad on March 17, prayers were offered to commemorate former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who had been the victim of a suicide bomber preceding the elections. Nawaz Sharif of the PML-N had himself not stood for election. But the two main parties had signed a coalition agreement on March 9 under which Asif Ali Zardari of the PPP would head the coalition government.
 As for President Musharraf, he had not attended the swearing in ceremony. That was as well, since a PPP luminary had publicly declared that the oath of office will be taken, under the Pakistani Constitution, bereft of the Amendments to it that were made by President Musharraf, immediately after imposing the Emergency on November 3, 2007.

In these circumstances, it would be foolhardy for anyone to forecast the blossoming of peaceful and friendly relations between Pakistan and India, as a result of the democratic elections in Pakistan. The chequered history of Indo-Pak talks also does not redound to the credit of either country. In one sense, Pakistan can claim some credit for maintaining some sense of consistency in that she has kept maintaining from the very beginning that Kashmir should be Pakistan’s alone by virtue of her Muslim population.

India, on the other hand, has come a poor second in comparison, by advancing different arguments at different times. That master of propaganda, Goebels, was right when he had declared that the bigger the lie, the greater the effect. He was never tired of saying: “If you repeat sufficiently frequently that Heaven is Hell and Hell is Heaven, people will start believing it!"

It is time for New Delhi to realise that instead of advancing a myriad arguments to convince people that India's claim over Kashmir is far superior to that of Pakistan, we should stand strictly by the legal position viz. that under the provisions of the Indian Independence Act, passed by the British Parliament, which led to the creation of India and Pakistan, the accession of Kashmir to India was and is final. In other words, if the legality of the accession of Kashmir to India were to be questioned, then the partition of British India into India and Pakistan in 1947 would itself lose all validity.

In his autobiography, In the Line of Fire, General Musharraf refers to that fateful day in 1999, when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif tried to deny permission to him, when he was the Army Chief, to land his aircraft in Karachi. This act boomeranged and the former was deposed. Musharraf goes on to admit: “We helped to create the Mujahideen, fired them with religious zeal in seminaries, armed them, paid them, fed them, and sent them to a jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. We did not stop to think how we would divert them to productive life after the jihad was won. This mistake cost Afghanistan and Pakistan more dearly than any other country. Neither did the United States realise what a rich, educated person like Osama bin Laden might later do with the organisation that we all had enabled him to establish.”

One is entitled to wonder whether any lessons have been learnt by either of our two countries, who had been involved in the exercise of mending their fences ever since their coming into existence!


(The writer is a former Indian Foreign Secretary.)