What exactly is the problem between India and Pakistan?

Lo, soul! seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?

The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,

The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,

The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,

The lands to be welded together.

A worship new I sing,

You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours,

You engineers, you architects, machinists, yours,

You, not for trade or transportation only,

But in God’s name, and for thy sake, O soul.

- Walt Whitman

The inability of the Indian ruling elite to coopt enough segments of the South Asian Muslim elite (particularly those in regions with large Muslim populations) into a power sharing matrix that secures their economic-social interests within the larger umbrella of the Indian nation state project.

Renowned Pakistani Marxist, Hamza Alvi, was the among the first to contemplate the reasons for partition in his essays regarding the Post Colonial direction of South Asian society. After the destruction of the last bastions of the Mughal empire and the integration of the overall Indian body politic into British Colonial rule, the most pivotal feature shaping the psyche of the Muslim ruling elite who led the Muslim political thought in India was the loss of economic and social power of Muslim educated political class throughout India.

This manifested most importantly among the ‘Salariat’ or the salaried government jobs which are the economic means of elevation for any community. Even today, in modern day Pakistan, nearly 70 years after Independence, most political parties and communities vie over permanent full time government salaried jobs as the make or break economic pie through which entire communities and societies can either be elevated or destroyed. Entire insurgencies have ended when the insurgents were added to the government payroll. And entire governments toppled over attempts to privatize state companies which formed the platform for government salaried jobs in Pakistan.

It was even more important nearly 150–200 years ago when salaried state jobs in the Colonial empire were the key means for a educated political elite to rise when the only alternative was hereditary feudalism. And thus, the loss of such coveted salaried government jobs to the Hindu community who were more willing to embrace English style education and upbringing as well as the 1857 war which sidelined Muslims even further, was the first fissure that would lead to the fires of partition in 1947.

Even the language issue of Urdu-Persian-Hindi-English was because the loss of language often meant the loss of employment. Comparable to how you can’t get good jobs today if you dont speak, read or write English well.

Funnily enough, this often transcended religious boundaries and there are accounts of Hindu Pandits in Kashmir who made their bread and butter in Persian as state employees of the local empires back then fighting to keep Persian as the official language of the region.

If you didn’t speak the state’s language, you lost access to the salaried state jobs. A concept that is often lost upon say an American audience who never viewed state employment as that big a deal. Or modern day Indian and Pakistani youth who while viewing state employment as prestigious, have a ton of alternatives in the private sector compared to say 100 years ago where the key means of social elevation aside from hereditary land ownership was state employment in salaried jobs.

This loss of access to state salaried jobs is, according to Alvi, the root of the later bifurcation of the sub continent as political movements led by the local elites arose to contest limited state resources.

The inability of Congress to incorporate the Muslim nationalist movement into it’s fold either due to outmaneuvering by the British or their own ineptitude was why the movement turned into a separatist movement.

But i’m being too harsh on them: Several of the Punjabi feudal elite and Pakhtun/Baloch tribal elite remained warm to the idea of a united India due to Nehrus incorporation of the elites in those areas into Congress’s patronage.

Modern day Pakistan has it’s own elites that can broadly be classified into the following groups:

1. The Military-Bureaucratic elite
2. The Islamist Ideologues
3. The Ethnic elite

The Military-Bureaucratic elite comprise the ex-colonial state apparatus left behind by the British that has now spawned an entire economy of their own with the military, judiciary and civil service being an autonomous ruling structure parallel to civilian elected leaders.

The Islamist ideologues comprise a fractured collection of religious parties, Islamist sympathizers in state institution and grass roots led movements across the country centered around religious legislation. Electorally somewhat limited but surprisingly potent street power.

The Ethnic elite being the political elected representatives who define the patronage networks that redistribute state resources among their followers and can either be proxies for the military or independent of it in elected bodies.

Indian foreign policy has never really attempted to incorporate the ruling elite of it’s neighbors into the security-economic matrix of the Indian near abroad. Mostly due to financial constraints on the Indian economy which cannot sustain such patronage networks.

The one exception being Bhutan which is pretty well enmeshed in the Indian security framework and it’s elites incorporated into Indian patronage.

The recent falling out with Nepal is a grim reminder of how brute forcing smaller neighbors in South Asia to establish a kind of hegemonic presence rarely works when there is another hegemony on the block (China) to step in as the substitute patron.

After the SAARC related isolation of Pakistan, it seemed that only a major blunder on the part of Indian foreign policy could break the tight central alignment around New Delhi. And that’s exactly what happened.

The fuel embargo with Nepal, the migrant and BSF issue with Bangladesh, the legacy of the LTTE conflict with Sri Lanka and the ‘surgical strikes’ into Burma ensured that Pakistan and more importantly, China, would have some breathing room to maneuver in South Asia.

In retrospect though, it seems difficult to imagine whether India could have acted differently due to it’s domestic politics pushing for an India first narrative which makes sustaining international patronage networks at the expense of the local economy difficult to sell politically. Just take the Trump dismantling of US imperial networks in Europe and East Asia due to populist pressure at home as an example. The USSR went through the same when ethnic elites in the USSR republics demanded independence and Russia felt that they were being dragged down by the USSR states.

Foreign policy, when subjected to the whims of domestic politics can be tricky to implement efficiently which is why so many of the old powers segregate their foreign policy away from domestic politics in order to ensure its not subject to the whims of the average Joe on the street who can complain about why his tax dollars are going to an aid project in a country far from his own.

The US and UK had set up their foreign state departments for this particular purpose, in order to manage the affairs of their neo-colonial empires without disruptions from local electoral politics.

The muddling of that segregation and seeping of populism into foreign policy is what led to the debacles of Brexit and the American alienation of core allied states.

India is no different in that regards. The UK, US and USSR maintained their large empires by incorporating the political elites in their territories into the patronage networks of the empire. The political elites benefited in economic and security terms by remaining within the confines of their respective patron imperial project. And the imperial muscle of the empire ensured loyal local elites remained on their thrones.

A modern day example would be the Saudi family and the US, the Syrian ruling family and the Russians.

Indian foreign policy has never developed the sophistication required for creating a parallel arm of the government with enough political capital to maintain a cohesive and independent foreign policy needed for empire building, independent of domestic politics.

India’s Feeble Foreign Policy

The article is behind a paywall, but a quick summary is as follows:

1. The Indian foreign service is woefully understaffed and does not have enough manpower needed for a country of India’s size to service it’s entire foreign policy needs.
2. This means that current ambassadors and foreign service officials have broad mandates to carry out activities they see fit which can sometimes lack coherence.
3. There is no official white paper or document circulated among all Embassy staff to lay out India’s vision for it’s place in the world, reducing sync between political leadership and civil servants.
4. Foreign policy is extremely personality driven rather than institution driven, meaning that electoral changes and changes in top leadership (Prime minister, National security advisor) can lead to massive changes in foreign policy overnight reducing long term vision.
5. With the exception of the IDSA, most think tanks advising foreign policy in India are driven by corporation funding looking to advance a trade based agenda. This makes countries like Pakistan a grey area that can only be looked at from the national security perspective since trade with Pakistan is minimal.
6. Indian reluctance to expand foreign policy commitments at the behest of the US because the Indian leadership fear they are being propped up as a counterweight to China and would prefer to remain non-aligned as their historical position suggests. And would prefer not to make India a pawn in US machinations.

This reasonably explains why policy towards Pakistan is so chaotic with Modi rubbing shoulders with Nawaz in Lahore on one day and LoC firing on the border the next day.

There is always the central problem in place that a lot of people overlook:

India has never accepted the Military-Bureaucratic oligarchy in Pakistan, the over developed state apparatus left behind by the colonial government, as legitimate political power players to be negotiated with. And have only negotiated with weak civil leadership since the 73 Simla accords with Bhutto.

This is not a sustainable position. Pakistan is not India. The military has become a sustained political presence in all aspects of Pakistani life.

It’s OK to have high minded ideals around democracy and freedom. But look where they took the world in the 2003 Iraq War.

There can not be a peace process between India and Pakistan unless the Indian scope of foreign policy encompass ALL power players in Pakistan and has a comprehensive, coherent strategy for each.

The military, the bureaucracy, the elected leadership, the business class, the feudal lords, the Islamists and so on.

If India has aspirations to secure it’s South Asian neighborhood there are only two options available to it:

1. Continue efforts to establish a hegemony in it’s near abroad using military and economic muscle. Worked in Bhutan. Is not working in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Burma or Pakistan. This is not to say its not a sustainable strategy: The US established it’s hegemony in its near abroad during the Cuban missile crises. But India is not the US. Not yet anyway. There needs to be a re-evaluation in how successful covert, military and economic measures by India have been in subduing Pakistan. So far they have achieved little and the Pakistani elite opposed to India maintain a tight control of the country and continue to oppose Indian objectives.
2. India wins over the political elites in it’s neighboring countries and secures it’s near abroad by becoming the chief patron of the political elite in it’s South Asian neighbors. A policy somewhat successfully implemented in Bhutan and Afghanistan, thereby crowding out China to some extent, a rival patron in the region.

For #2, it’s going to take a lot of political capital and foreign policy ingenuity on the part of India.

How exactly does a Prime Minister go up to his cabinet and political base in India and say: We gotta rethink our entire policy platform for South Asia?

There is a dissonance in India between how they view their nation. Do they want to be regarded as a great power or not? How do they reconcile the desire to be regarded as a major power with the desire to not bear the costs of it?

In foreign policy, it’s not possible to have your cake and eat it too. Pakistanis are very realistic about it. We know we have traded state sovereignty a long time ago to meet the desired objectives of our political elites. Our political elites wanted low taxes on their farms, so we indebted ourselves to the IMF in pursuit of that. Our military wanted a frozen conflict in Kashmir, we bear the burden of that. Our Islamists wanted blasphemy laws, we lynched our minorities for that.

The same realization must be felt in Indian political corridors too. You cant have your cake and eat it too i.e. Be regarded as a great power but not bear the costs of it.

The hegemonic pressure on South Asian neighbor works well in a vacuum but South Asia is not a vacuum. Not anymore at least. The smaller countries have options now: align with China if New Delhi becomes to persistent. And India is not at that power level yet where they can directly crowd out China from all of it’s neighbors.

Which brings us to the politics of patronage in the neo colonial world.

Networks of power designed to redistribute resources among followers for loyalty are as old as time and still effective for the reason that human societies are often hierarchical at scale.

Pakistan’s internal political hierarchy and networks of patronage were during the cold war, embedded within the overall larger network of US patronage for allied states against the Communist bloc.

Indian foreign policy has no hopes for resolving their problems with Pakistan unless they either completely obliterate the Pakistani state (a difficult supposition with a nuclear armed entity) or they incorporate Pakistan into it’s political patronage.

Pakistan currently is in the Chinese orbit because the Chinese were faster with their foreign policy adeptness and response and have cleverly coopted the entire political elite of Pakistan into their political patronage with the exception of some minor players like the Baloch separatists. The lack of historical baggage between both nations and positive national consciousness are cherries on top.

Regarding India and Pakistan, the post 71 Pakistan is curiously more sure and secure in it’s identity vs the pre-71 Pakistan. Islamization and Muslim centric identity politics in Pakistan as well as successful nation-state building initiatives by the military-bureaucratic oligarchy which has laid waste to large swathes of local ethnic cultures to unify the nation under Islamic ideology, have made Pakistan more cohesive in it’s narrative about itself and less insecure about losing it’s purpose in a peace with India.

Pakistan’s military elite are not idiots. They have analyzed the policy making within the Indian security and foreign affairs matrix and grasped the trade centric, made in India approach being pursued.

Which is why the Corp Commander of Quetta is signalling to Indian officials that the military would be willing to freeze the Kashmir conflict in a Musharraf-Singh style settlement in exchange for trade related tolls for Indian merchandise being exported over it’s territories to Middle Eastern and Central Asian markets.

While the specifics aren’t important, the mindset is: The military is signalling it’s willingness to accept economic patronage from India.

Which is what the glaring red line is in New Delhi: Are we at that political space yet where we can began building networks of patronage in our near abroad?

The reason why this is a red line and a big question is this: Patronage networks cost money.

China’s economic strength has advanced to the point that they can build such networks under OBOR with their near abroad and farther. India, by great power standards, is still a poor country.

Which is why India goes the Russian route instead: Limited military and covert operations in the near region combined with using economic sanctions around energy and resource strangulation. See Ukraine as an example. It’s the only option available to India right now.

If i had to give a ball park figure, I would guess that it would cost India somewhere around 25 billion USD ANUALLY to establish patronage networks with it’s South Asian neighbors, excluding Burma and Afghanistan. And that’s just for 2019 scales, as population growth and economic complexity continues in South Asia, the figure is marked to go up.

This is not a small figure. And it doesn’t seem to be within the economic reach of India nor is it manageable enough to sell to the Indian public.

What exactly would patronage for the Pakistani elite look like?

It’s a complex matter. All nations want their cake and want to eat it too.

Pakistan would want the investments from India and the patronage but wouldn’t like to throw open their markets to cheap Indian goods (We’ve already done that for the Chinese anyway).

India would want the market access but wouldn’t care much for domestic Pakistani industries and productions dear to the ruling local elite.

The military currently prioritizes a couple of things:

1. They see themselves as the upholders of Pakistani nationalism
2. They want to make sure their economic privileges remain
3. They want to ensure some long term sustainable arrangement for the Pak economy and political presence
4. They want to retain control of key elements in government such as foreign affairs, defense

There are other aspects but lets focus on these for now.

Point #1 is not hard for the younger Indian generations to swallow. Most of the older Indian right wingers who talked about how partition was a mistake and how India should regain lost Pakistani territories are either old or dead or will soon be dead. The younger generations have never known what United India was like so have no nostalgic claims to Hindu temples and Indian culture within Pakistan.

Balkanization of Pakistan would be a project that would have to be dropped. #4 isn’t much of an issue either if a friendly entity is calling the shots on foreign policy and defense.

#2 is the real cake though. A Peace with India must not come at the cost of the military’s economic pie. And this is where Indian political elite would have to get creative about how they sell the solution to the Indian public.

In a nutshell: The Indian economy would have to provide contracts to the military run enterprises in Pakistan. Whether it’s Fauji Cement, NESCOM or the bakeries and gas stations run by the military (Maybe when the next Ambani gets married, the Pakistan military’s mess service can do the catering).

These military run institutions are what provide the cushy retirement for officers after their service, provide the added perks and privileges to officers beyond their base salary, provide tax havens and sustained upper-middle lifestyles for the military fraternity. Whether it’s subcontracts for larger Indian defense projects, construction contracts in Pakistan, tolls fees paid by Indian truckers to the military run NLC or broadcasting fees by Indian channels to SUPARCO, the motive stays the same: The military economy is integrated into the Indian economy. The military should also not lose it’s purpose for existence: Defense. And the Indians would have to figure out some kind of arrangement where the Pak military can pretend to have some utility in a South Asian peace (guard the Afghan border, counter terror, French foreign legion style foreign deployments should the Indians start sending missions abroad etc).

Currently this is a hard sell. The Pak Military and the BJP have begun to develop an almost symbiotic reliance on each other for their own gains. The Pak military can point to the BJP and claim they are protecting Pakistan from Hinduvata and Indian aggression and what not. The BJP finds the border tension useful for politics, especially if the domestic economy is in trouble. It’s a convenient partnership for both.

So the peace would have to be more profitable than the current relationship of convenience. And it’s not as easy to implement as one thinks. Indian domestic politics at the moment are not conducive to such a proposal that literally would require Indian tax payers to spend billions of dollars a year subsidizing the military economy of a long time foe in order to “buy the peace”.

But if the recent Iraq war is any example, the failure of the US to incorporate local Iraqi elite into their political fabric led to an intense insurgency and civil war that lasted almost a decade and led to the rise of ISIS. All because the US refused to work with any of the political elite that did not have their sanction, whether it was ex-Baathists, the old Iraqi military, pro-Iranian Shia clerics or Sunni elite.

Establishing patronage networks over the political elite is the fastest way of establishing a peace assuming that war doesn’t make more money (in Iraq, war was more profitable for the neo-cons in the US than the peace).

And sometimes, people can’t be bought. Ideologues will stick with their guns and there are those in the Pak military who would be fearful of losing face if they look like they abandoned Kashmir for Indian contract money. Which is why patronage is often defined as not just economic benefits but also the provision of legitimacy: The British colonial rule legitimized it’s allied Indian political elite with legal and political recognition of their local authority as well as providing them face saving where they needed it. Some kind of Musharraf-Singh type deal with mutual de-escalation, demilitarization and soft borders in Kashmir would have to be worked out so the military can then claim they were part of the peace and not bought out.

Such a deal would be a tough sell in India too for a number of reasons, one of which is that India just isn’t wealthy enough for such an undertaking. China can single handedly launch OBOR but India must partner with the US, Japan and Australia to launch rival projects and even then they are bogged down by slower politics.

Aside from the military, the Islamists and the Ethnic elite are far more easier to handle if the military is incorporated first since the military has thwarted previous attempts at establishing a peace without making it a party at the table.

Islamist parties and Ethnic political parties would simply use any Indian influx of money in the form of investment, trade and economic assistance and simply embed the money into their local patronage networks to shore up their political bases.

In addition to the dollars, the Yens, the Riyals and the rupees. Money ain’t got no faith, right?

Indian foreign policy is in that tricky phase where the country is powerful enough to exercise more potent military and political options against it’s neighbors but not powerful enough to establish the patronage networks of global empires like the British empire, the US or the USSR.

Which is why the foreign actions resemble current Russia more in some aspects.

But we have talked a lot about the view from India: Pakistan also has it’s own issues to ponder. The Islamization of Pakistan, erosion of ethnic base identities and 70+ years of existence have somewhat begun solidifying Pakistan’s identity to the extent that peace with India doesn’t carry with it the shadow of self doubt about Pakistan’s reason for existence.

And our ability to control our territory and borders to the extent that we are able to deliver on our end any curb in non-state actor activity is questionable if we look at the Iran situation, where Pakistan is having difficulty controlling it’s border from militants carrying out attacks in Iran.

While the Pak Military would undoubtedly crack down on militants within their territory if a deal is struck with India that satisfies them, there is always the possibility of rouge elements in the lower-mid tiers not buying the peace and trying to sabotage it with their own initiatives.

And lastly of course, while the wave of militant Islamism may have been beaten back in recent years, the underlying religious tensions in Pakistan are nothing to scoff at either and it’s difficult to build a top side peace between governments when the religious communities underlying the peace have negative-ish opinions of each other’s faith.

Also, we don’t even know what Pakistan’s future will be in a time when the state is undergoing a massive economic crises, tensions over the PTM and what not. Peace with India might take a back burner to more immediate crises unless peace with India has some direct solution to said crises.

The gap between India and China as great powers is large enough that there won’t be any supplanting of the Chinese networks of patronage in Pakistan for any near future.

They are investing nearly $56 billion or whatever the CPEC figure is now in a project that cleverly integrates itself with the patronage networks of the military, the political elite, the Islamists and the local forces while at the same time achieving Chinese national objectives. A true hallmark of how effective and intelligent Chinese foreign policy making and it’s allied think tanks are.

But who knows what the future holds?

Perhaps 10–30 years down the line, the gap would be smaller. And Indian foreign affairs would have evolved beyond the current restrictions and backed up by a larger economy, be more effective in it’s implementation.

Also, before we get all kumbaya over this arrangement: Know that an Indo-Pak peace doesn’t automatically translate into a betterment for the lives of Pakistani citizens. We were part of the US patronage network before and it gave us Tarbela and Mangla dam, civil aid for civil society, Fullbright scholarships, aid for the economy, military hardware for our borders and lots of shoulder rubbing with important white people.

But it also gave us tensions with the USSR, the Afghan Jihad, US support for military dictators at the expense of the civil process and so on.

An Indian substitution of patronage networks might change some things: travel to India, influx of Indian goods and culture, relaxation of the border, more tourism and so on.

But it won’t replace issues like abductions of missing persons, crackdowns on the press, feudal stranglehold of rural areas, centre-province tensions and so on.

The military budget wont go down to 0 which is problematic enough alone if it wasn’t for the fact that our military budget is not our biggest problem anymore: slowing economic growth and growing debt repayments are.

It’s a fundamental truth our grandfather’s grandfathers have passed down to us for generations: the land has changed hands for ever. We are the whims and mercies of greater entities who lord over us and decide our lives and deaths.

Our only consolation being that death will, in the end, come for us all.

- Judith Kroll