Pakistan's Chimerical Quest for Parity with India Has Hit a Dead End

Few will deny that the roots of India’s problems with Pakistan lie in the partition of the country in 1947. But just what a tangled growth those roots have yielded is difficult to grasp at times.

When negotiations were taking place with the British, Muhammad Ali Jinnah sought to somehow ensure that Muslims, constituting a quarter of the Indian population, would be given political parity with the majority Hindus. Jinnah’s views were based on the two-nation theory – that the Hindus and Muslims in India were separate “nations”.

Over the years, his demands varied, but it was always aimed at somehow squaring the circle – assuring ‘Muslim' political and cultural equality in an unequal demographic situation.

During the negotiations for the Interim Government in 1946 he demanded a 50-50 representation in the government between the Muslim League and the Congress.  He initially engaged with the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 for a federal India with Muslim and Hindu provinces, and sought equal representation of such provinces in the federal legislature and the executive.   

Four planks for effective parity

Since real parity  was not possible, what Pakistan did after Jinnah was to pursue “effective parity” whose central strategy was to somehow diminish India geographically, politically and economically, so that Pakistan could be, and be seen, as its equal. 

This policy has been based on four planks

1. External alliances to balance a larger India.

2. High military spending to build a force that can deter India

3. Fabricating nuclear weapons

4. Using terrorism as an instrument to promote separatism and civil war to breakup and destabilise India. 

As M.S. Venkataramani has shown, Pakistan approached the US in 1947 and requested an alliance and went to the extent of even asking the Americans to pay the salaries of their military. The US was not initially interested in South Asia and turned down the requests.

But by 1953,  the US had identified Pakistan as its partner in South Asia. In 1954, the US and Pakistan signed a mutual defence assistance agreement followed by Pakistan joining SEATO and CENTO. Its mutual defence pact has yet to be revoked. Pakistan sensed opportunity when India was humiliated by China in the war of 1962 and it began back-door talks with China which culminated in a border agreement. This was the beginning of the Pakistan-China relationship which has today reached the status of a quasi alliance. There have never been doubts that this alliance is based on the mutual interests of both sides to check India.

In the 1965, Pakistan sought to wrest Kashmir from India through a war in which China played a bit role in aiding Karachi. In the 1960s, through its eastern wing, Pakistan helped a slew of north-eastern separatist groups in India. All this was with the view of breaking up India into manageable bits. However, karma struck back when Pakistan itself came apart following the rebellion in East Pakistan and Indian military intervention in 1971.

Going nuclear

Pakistan’s leaders, military and civilians, now decided to get the ultimate deterrent, the nuclear bomb. In a project begun following a meeting in Multan in January 1972, President Bhutto authorised a programme to go full steam ahead. He had been an advocate of nuclearisation since the 1965 war.

This is one area where Pakistan has been at par with India, if not slightly ahead. Though India conducted a nuclear test in 1974, Pakistan received assistance from China in terms of nuclear materials and weapons design in 1982. Further, in 1990, the Chinese tested a Pakistani device based on their designs at Lop Nor. Pakistan thus had a verified design which enabled its prompt response to the Indian tests in May 1998. 

Militancy

Pakistan started “facilitating” the Khalistani militancy at its very outset in the early 1980s by enabling militants to acquire arms and go through the border to carry out their terror campaign in Indian Punjab. In the late 1980s, things started bubbling up in Jammu and Kashmir, and Pakistan “facilitated” the growth of the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) and its uprising against  India at the end of 1989 and early 1990.

Thousands of Kashmiris crossed the border and returned with some training and arms provided by Pakistan. When this militancy was defeated, Pakistan, having learnt a great deal from the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union, took up the Kashmir “cause”. It sent in Pakistani terrorists who took on the security forces and conducted occasional massacres of civilians on the Indian side of the Line of Control.

In the 1990-2000 period, Pakistan had also sought to link the Khalistan and Kashmir movements but it did not work out. The Khalistani militancy was quickly rolled up by military and police action by 1993, the year in which Pakistan facilitated the  multiple bombing attack in Bombay aimed at unsettling India’s economic growth. Pakistan also stepped up its support for the Kashmiri militancy by sending in ever-larger number of Pakistani fighters into the fray.

Following a near war after the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001, Pakistan, under President Pervez Musharraf, took a step back. By now it was clear that Kashmir was not about to break away from India. But the terror campaign did not ease off. 

Terror

Following the destruction of the Babri Masjid, Pakistan had sought to capitalise on the angst of Indian Muslims by recruiting them for a terror campaign in an arc from Gujarat to Uttar Pradesh. Operating from Nepal and Bangladesh, ISI operatives sent a stream of terrorists and Indian recruits to destabilise India. But this campaign, peaked in 2008 when the so-called Indian Mujahideen carried out a trail of bombings and were eventually wiped out. Their leaders have always operated from sanctuaries  in Pakistan, as have  some Khalistani terrorists.

The Mumbai attack of 2008 was the last major attempt to use terrorism to destabilise India. Whether in the messaging or in their get up, an effort was made to pass off the terrorists as Indians. But the capture of Ajmal Kasab and the interception of their communications in the 60 hour rampage made it clear that the planners of the attack were in Pakistan.

The Mumbai attack in a sense also marks the point at which the terror monster began to bite back in Pakistan. Led at various times by Baitullah Mehsud, Hakimullah Mehsud, Hafiz Gul Bahadur and others, they turned their militancy against the Pakistani state. This was described by the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid in his book Descent into Chaos in 2008.

This period also marked the growing infirmity of the Pakistani state. Benazir Bhutto’s assassination and the downfall of the Musharraf Presidency began a process that was marked by political instability, polarisation and a delicate balance between the military and the civilian government, even as militancy rose across the country.

Opposition

The rise and fall of Imran Khan’s PTI only underscored the decline. The 2024 elections revealed that Imran was the most popular force in the country and his arrest sparked widespread rioting and an anti-military upsurge. The 2024 elections were rigged against him and since then instability has grown with a rising toll of terrorist attacks. The dominance of the military cannot even provide a band aid to stem the bleeding. 

We must see the Pahalgam attack in this context. The exaggerated Pakistani claims of its ‘accomplishments’ in the fighting that followed Operation Sindoor and its elevation of Gen Asif Munir to the rank of Field Marshal are a desperate attempt to stabilise the situation. But the military, as the experience of Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Zia ul Haq and Pervez Musharraf shows, can hardly provide solutions.

Economy

Over time, Pakistan’s claims to effective parity with India have worn thinner and thinner. Now, on the economic front, there is nothing to claim. On the military front, too, nuclear weapons have not proved to be the magic wand under which terrorism could flourish.  India had earlier shown it can deal with all the terrorist attacks Pakistan can throw at it. And now it inclined to hit back as well. China remains as Pakistan’s “iron brother” but there are clear limits as to what the alliance can do.

Pakistan’s insecurities at the time of independence are understandable; it was a nation conjured out of the thin air by Mohammed Ali Jinnah. But today, though flailing, it is an established state whose security against its huge eastern neighbour is guaranteed by nuclear weapons and not by its over-weening Army. Now it needs to get beyond its national insecurities and learn to live as a normal nation with its neighbours.

 Both Pakistan and India need to realise that they are destined to be neighbours forever. A failing or failed Pakistan is not in India’s interest, neither is a belligerent one. A country that is hoping to emerge as a major world power cannot be sharing a major portion of its border with a hostile power.

As for Pakistan, it is geography and demography that make its effort at parity with India a chimerical quest. But there is nothing that says that it must not live in terms of sovereign equality.

There is the matter of Kashmir, which has woven itself into the make-believe world of Pakistan. There was nothing in the Partition arrangements that said that the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir was to become part of Pakistan. Jinnah’s acceptance of the (failed) accession of the overwhelmingly Hindu Junagadh indicated that he did not assume that the princely states were to be divided on religious grounds. Pakistan made a grab for Kashmir, but failed to capture the prized valley and has since woven the myth of it being the jugular of the Pakistani state.

Peace

Over the years, there have been tantalising glimpses of the possibility of a South Asia where India and Pakistan live in peace. The first was in 1953 when Prime Ministers Nehru and Mohammad Ali Bogra agreed to a plebiscite in Kashmir, but the issue foundered when the US appeared as a military ally of Pakistan.

In 1972, India’s hopes that its lenient handling of post-Bangladesh War Pakistan could lead to peace came to a nought as the Pakistan Army embarked on a long quest for revenge.

In 2007-2008, through the so-called Four Point formula, the two countries worked out a way of handling Kashmir without changing borders, but the process collapsed along with the Musharraf presidency. Indeed, in 2004, at the SAARC summit, they had agreed on creating a South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) by 2014, but all of it has come to nought.

Good relations can only be built on realistic terms not on political fantasy. There are things India can do, and has tried to do, to aid this process – Gujral’s composite dialogue of 1997, Vajpayee’s Lahore trip in 1999, the Agra summit of 2001, Manmohan Singh’s dialogue with Musharraf and forbearance (combined with using evidence to build a global case for Pakistan to act) after the Mumbai attack of 2008, and even Modi’s outreach of 2014-15 – have been recent instances of the effort. Indeed, recall that the Modi government actually invited Pakistani officials to investigate the Pathankot airbase attack of 2016.

Since we are neighbours who, as Vajpayee famously said you don’t have the option to change, we seem destined to ride a relationship roller-coaster that  is becoming steeper by the year. In recent years there has been little interest on either side to change the situation for the better. Like an open wound, the India-Pakistan situation is like a wound that can only fester. 

Manoj Joshi is a Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi

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