C Raja Mohan writes: India and beyond — Bilawal Bhutto’s diplomatic challenges

That the Pakistan Army, long the arbiter of the nation’s major policies including the India strategy, is finding it hard to set the agenda is evident by the latest attacks on the former chief, General Qamar Jawed Bajwa. Senior media figures have accused Bajwa of making major “compromises” with India on Kashmir; they also alleged that he was claiming that the Pakistan army is in “no position to fight” India. Few in the media or the political class dared to criticise Bajwa during his six-year tenure (2016-22) as the army chief. There now is open season on him as the prestige of the Pakistan Army as an institution hit one of its lowest points.

Part of the problem has been Bajwa’s endless meddling in domestic politics. He helped install Imran Khan as the PM in 2018 and chose to pull him down in 2022. He unseated Nawaz Sharif on flimsy grounds in 2017 and allowed the Sharif family to come back into the mainstream in 2022. Whatever his harmful legacy on domestic politics might be, Bajwa did seek to reorient Pakistan’s foreign policy and made a major effort to improve ties with India. But to say, as his media critics do, that he was selling out to Delhi is laughable.

Although the senior journalists claimed to reveal the details of an off-the-record briefing by Bajwa a couple of years ago, his attempt to engage and reduce tensions with India was no secret. The broad contours of his approach were in the public domain after Delhi and Islamabad announced a ceasefire agreement in February 2021. This came after heightened tensions following the Pulwama terror attack and Balakot bombing by India’s Air Force and the Pakistani riposte in February 2019. India’s constitutional changes in Kashmir during August 2019 saw Pakistan go ballistic. It cut down ties with India and insisted that Delhi must roll back the Kashmir changes before it could resume the dialogue.

Bajwa recognised the futility of this approach soon enough and sought to end the impasse in bilateral relations. The ceasefire agreement was a product of back-channel talks between the Indian national security adviser Ajit Doval and Bajwa. The ceasefire was to be followed by several confidence-building measures to relax tensions between the two countries. One idea was to resume overland trade between the two countries. Imran Khan, who had approved the decision as the commerce minister, overruled it a couple of days later as the Prime Minister.

Imran had calculated that the political costs to himself from normalising the ties with India were too high, and Gen Bajwa could not persuade him to think otherwise. But the claim that Gen Bajwa sold out on Kashmir does not stand scrutiny. The joint statement issued by the Directors General of the Military Operations on February 25, explicitly talks about the two sides resuming talks on their core concerns —Kashmir and cross-border terrorism respectively for Pakistan and India.

If things had gone according to the script, the ceasefire could have begun another round of Pakistan’s bilateral engagement with India. The differences between Bajwa and Imran Khan were not just about India. Throughout Imran Khan’s three-and-a-half-year reign, Bajwa had to continuously clean up after his foreign policy misadventures.

Imran’s anti-American posturing saw the deterioration of ties with Washington. His enthusiasm to be seen in Moscow on the day Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine outraged Europe and the US. Imran also sought to align with Turkey as it sought to wrest the leadership of the Islamic world from Saudi Arabia and picked quarrels with the United Arab Emirates. This in turn undermined the traditional goodwill for Pakistan in the Arab Gulf. Today, Turkey is normalising ties with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, while Pakistan finds itself marginalised in the Middle East.

Bajwa’s moves to reduce tensions with India were part of a broader effort to rejig Pakistan’s foreign policy. It was a recognition that current policies are accelerating Pakistan’s relative decline in the region. His call to discard Pakistan’s obsession with geopolitics and focus on national development, geoeconomics, and good neighbourly relations underlined the case for Pakistan’s urgent strategic course correction.

But the demons that the Army has unleashed over the last five decades—addiction to jihad, empowerment of religious extremism at home, and letting the Kashmir rhetoric overwhelm pragmatic considerations—were hard to wish away. They had entrenched themselves in Pakistan’s national mind space.

To make matters worse, Imran Khan made these demons his own. In the past, it was the Pakistan Army that nixed the efforts of the civilians to normalise ties with neighbours. Now it was Imran Khan who overruled the Army on India.

Although he is out of power, Imran’s dominance of street politics has severely limited the space for the current civilian ruling coalition—which includes Zardari’s Peoples Party and the Sharifs’ Muslim league—to take bold new initiatives towards India.

Pakistan will need a lot of time and space to get its domestic act together and rebuild a foreign policy consensus. Is there anything that India can do until then? One priority for Delhi must be to sustain the valuable backchannel to the army leadership in Rawalpindi. Weakened though it is, the Pakistan Army remains the only credible interlocutor for India in the near term.

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The writer is senior fellow, Asia Society Policy Institute, Delhi and a contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express