PEACEMAKING
Two former spy chiefs on why India and Pakistan need to restart talks
During the scorching summer months from March to July, large parts of India battle some sort of a water crisis. There is no other natural resource that animates politics in India as water. Think the Mullaperiyar dam dispute, or the sharing of Cauvery river waters, to give just two examples.
Despite the intensity of passions they provoke, they have a way of slipping out of the public consciousness as soon as the rains arrive. This refusal to address water sharing in a comprehensive manner, and beyond egoistical territorial disputes, is an important theme in The Watershed Moment by Aniket Ghanashyam, a waterpolicy consultant to several States.
‘Day Zero’ crises
Ghanashyam’s most impressive achievement is in giving a bird’s eye view of the challenges triggered by water scarcity the world over. So we have succinct summaries of the ‘Day Zero’ water crisis in 2018, which the author witnessed as a student in Cape Town, South Africa where citizens waited with dread for a day that water would run out. Though ‘Day Zero’ never came, Ghanashyam says that it rocked citizens “to the core” and it gave them a “new found respect for water and its value to society.”
He also discusses near‘Day Zero’ crises in Barcelona, drought woes in Australia and brewing The Watershed discontent over
Moment watersharing
Aniket Ghanashyam arrangements between Manipal Universal Press
Singapore and Malaysia. ₹650
He discusses the history and civilisational connect of dams, their environmental consequences and how they may have promoted extreme water use inefficiency. Ghanashyam lists a host of technological solutions — waste water treatment, biofiltration, drip irrigation — that are all aimed at increasing wateruse efficiency. But a discussion on the true cost of implementing them, especially in poor countries, is missing. As an introductory primer to multiple dimensions of the global water crisis, this book is a valuable addition to the literature.
When dealing with contentious issues between neighbours and arch enemies as India and Pakistan have grown to be, can established practices in counselling and mediation, like those used for unhappy married couples, be applied? More importantly, does the setting, venue and language of discourse matter?
During Narendra Modi’s visit to Lahore in December 2015, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif asked External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar why he preferred to speak in English. Jaishankar allegedly replied that it was because Sharif was a “foreign head of state to him”, indicating a stern formality and distance in tone. This, and other anecdotes, are cited in a new book, Covert: The Psychology of War and Peace, in which psychologist Neil Aggarwal talks to former R&AW chief A.S. Dulat and former ISI chief Asad Durrani. It’s a sequel to the 2018 Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace.
In that, journalist Aditya Sinha had conducted the conversation, and he dwelled for a considerable amount on how the language, religion, familial ties and personal aspects of the interlocutors affect their ability to engage each other.
Cultural links
The question on whether a common local language and personal links work should be further analysed, however. Both Prime Minister Modi and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee used Urdu in conversations with Nawaz Sharif, forging personal ties and embracing him publicly during their respective visits to Lahore in 1999 and 2015, for example. In contrast, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who was Punjabi and born in Pakistan, seldom spoke in anything but
The publication of Spy Chronicles, the firstofitskind collaboration between spy chiefs of two warring nations, had set off storms in both Delhi and Islamabad. Dulat faced a barrage of criticism from officials in Delhi
English during meetings with the Pakistani leadership, nor did he visit Pakistan during his entire tenure. Singh’s government, however, maintained a longer span of unbroken formal engagement with Pakistan (20042008 and 20102014), compared to attempts by Vajpayee (19992001 and 20032004) and Modi (20152016 and 20182019).
As a sequel, Covert is quite different from Spy Chronicles, as the earlier book probed events and dialogues between Dulat and Durrani while they were in positions of power, and for years after when they remained “in the know” of the IndiaPakistan official dialogue process. The latest version dwells more interaction largely been forgotten?
In Europe, particularly, there is a strong focus on the Greeks and Romans alone. I trace it back to the 18th century when the concept of civilisation first came into being. Ideas developed in the Victorian period then organised the world into ‘civilisations’, separate and often mutually opposed, and it has been extremely damaging to the way people think of the world they are living in, and of the past.
Did the concept of civilisation provide useful support for western European imperialism?
The European idea of
A:Q:A:How the World Made the West ₹699
Covert: The Psychology of War and Peace ₹699 on the “TrackII” initiatives the two men have been a part of for two decades. It looks at how nonformal dialogue works, and what could provide a breakthrough to take talks to the TrackI level. The format of both volumes are Q&A transcripts of hours of mediated, unedited conversations, and is sometimes tedious, and should have been reframed; the editors may even consider a third work distilling the content of the first two books into a more readerfriendly format.
Government action
Dulat and Durrani engage warmly like before, but the narrative in Covert seems far less anecdotal and newsworthy — they may both be playing safe, given their experience with the previous book. The publication of Spy Chronicles, the firstofitskind collaboration between spy chiefs of two warring nations, had set off storms in both Delhi and Islamabad. Dulat faced a barrage of criticism from officials in Delhi and, after his memoir A Life in the Shadows was published, the Modi government amended its Service Pension rules forbidding officers from the IB, R&AW and 24 security services from writing books without official permission. In Islamabad, the Pakistan Army ordered a court of inquiry into Durrani’s comments in the book and put him on the Exit Control List in order to prevent him from leaving the country for a period.
Push for engagement
The DulatDurrani conversations reveal that the refusal to talk is ideological and emotionled, whereas the need for engagement is more rational and ‘realpolitik’. In a separate clinical paper titled, ‘How Psychoanalytic Theory and Track II Diplomacy Can Inform Each Other: A Dialogue with the Former
Heads of India and Pakistan’s Foreign Intelligence Agencies’, Dr. Aggarwal concludes that there is a need to learn to continue talks “even when intense emotional effects such as rage threaten to interrupt dialogue”. The “ground rules” of the dialogue are simple: that the two discussants would interact civilly, listen and not interrupt the other, speak freely and empathise. Having exhausted so many avenues of engagement without much to show for it, perhaps what the two countries really need, is not more leaders, diplomats and generals, but counselling and therapy. civilisation was first born as an excuse and cover for imperialism. It began with the belief that civilised societies had a duty to help less developed ones gain freedom and sovereignty, and that despotism was a legitimate form of government in dealing with “barbarians, provided the end be their improvement.” By the 1820s, French historians like Francois Guizot began to use civilisation in the plural, to refer to civilisations that preceded the European civilisation, showing particular interest in the Indians, Etruscans, Romans and Greeks, among others. But the problem was that it created an idea that the civilisations were cut off from each other, separate. Their focus was on identifying and ranking individual societies’ inherent cultural traits rather than on their progress towards a shared human ideal. Cultures in this view were not only quite separate from one another, but had natural ceilings to their development. Over time, this helped to justify harsher forms of imperial rule.
Q: So, you argue that civilisational thinking misrepresents history...
Yes, because it is not peoples that make history, but people, and the connections that they create with one other. Human society is not a forest full of trees, with subcultures branching out from single trunks. It is more like a bed of flowers, in need of regular pollination to reseed and grow anew, as ecologist Eric Sanderson told me. Distinctive local cultures come and go, but they are created and sustained by interaction — and once contact is made, no land is an island. There has never been a single, pure Western or European culture. So called western values like freedom, rationality, justice and tolerance are not originally western, and the West itself is in large part a product of longstanding links with a much larger network of societies, to south and north as well as east.
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