What should be expected from Shehbaz Sharif as Pakistan Prime Minister? Very little, really. There will certainly be a change in style, but no change in substance
Let’s face it. Pakistan is something of a malady among a section of the Indian media, ‘intelligentsia’, diplomats and even politicians who are otherwise quite hard-nosed and normally not given to romanticising about things that have little chance of working.
The moment there is some change in Pakistan, there is a buzz in New Delhi about what it means for India. Somehow the fact that the change in Islamabad or Rawalpindi has very little to do with India and doesn’t in any way signify a change in policy towards India, just escapes the people who are desperately trying to find virtue where none exists and eager to fall for the ‘pleasant lies’ (a term coined by the US academic Christine Fair) coming from the other side of the Radcliffe line. The bottom-line is that a change of prime ministers or Pakistan army chiefs is just a change of face, not a change in narratives or policy.
Whatever excitement was generated among the usual suspects and the eternal optimists in India with Shehbaz Sharif replacing Imran Khan in Islamabad should have been sufficiently dampened after the initial messages exchanged between the PMs of both countries.
There will certainly be a change in style, but no change in substance. Unlike Imran Khan who showed his poor upbringing and his loutishness by throwing all diplomatic proprieties to the wind, Shehbaz will not cross the line of good behaviour.
In his first speech as Prime Minister, Shehbaz couldn’t help place Kashmir at the centre of his policy on India – “no durable peace without Kashmir solution according to UN resolutions and aspirations of people of Kashmir”. Nothing new in this standard Pakistani formulation which Shehbaz Sharif parroted.
In his tweet, Narendra Modi congratulated Shehbaz, but underlined “peace and stability in a region free of terror”. Shehbaz thanked Modi and repeated that settling J&K is “indispensable” and then side-stepped the terrorism caveat by talking about sacrifices of Pakistan in fighting terrorism.
Interestingly, the tweets that were exchanged were from the personal and not official handles of both prime ministers. Whether this was to give a personal touch is not clear, but they both pretty much stuck to their guns in so far as the official stated policy of their countries is concerned.
So, what should be expected from Shehbaz Sharif as Prime Minister? Very little, really. There will certainly be a change in style, but no change in substance. Unlike Imran Khan who showed his poor upbringing and his loutishness by throwing all diplomatic proprieties to the wind, Shehbaz will not cross the line of good behaviour. In other words, Shehbaz is unlikely to indulge in the kind of vile, vulgar and vituperative language that Imran Khan used on India and Modi.
This will certainly help in improving the optics, but only on the margins. People in India would do well to keep in mind that Shehbaz, or for that matter any other Pakistani politician, including Bilawal Bhutto, have always taken a fairly strident and uncompromising stand on India in general and Kashmir in particular.
The argument that the stridency is a political necessity is self-defeating in so far as improving relations with India is concerned. The thing is that until the Pakistanis are ready to change their discourse on India, and tone down their anti-India rhetoric, any outreach will remain only cosmetic and tactical, easily reversible. It means that Pakistan is biding its time and has no intention to move forward.
Time is on India’s side. We have Pakistan on the ropes. The last thing India should do is rush in to engage the Pakistanis at this stage.
Having been a close confidant of his brother and three-time Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, Shehbaz knows the pitfalls of trying to normalise relations with India. In 1999, Nawaz Sharif engaged with Atal Bihari Vajpayee and signed the Lahore Declaration. Within weeks, the army sabotaged that initiative in Kargil.
In his third term, Nawaz Sharif again tried to pick up the pieces. Despite opposition from the army and the Pakistan foreign office babus, he accepted the invitation to Modi’s swearing-in ceremony. Later, he engaged with Modi in Ufa. This was followed by the terror attacks in Gurdaspur.
In December 2015, Modi went on an impromptu visit to Lahore to congratulate Nawaz Sharif on his grand-daughter’s wedding. A week later, there was a terror attack on the Pathankot air force station. Nawaz Sharif outreach to India became one of the main issues of conflict with the military establishment and was used for the lurid propaganda campaign to undermine his government and portray him as a traitor.
Shehbaz will not want to repeat this and will be careful to not give either the army or the opposition a handle to beat him with.
Shehbaz also knows that he is leading a disparate coalition. Many of his allies are parties that take their cue from the military. This places a big constraint on him especially in the unlikely event that he wanted to attempt normalisation of relations with India. At best, what he might do is smoothen out some of the rough edges. It is possible that diplomatic relations will be restored to the High Commissioner level.
There is also a possibility of some ad hoc trade in commodities that Pakistan desperate needs – pharmaceuticals, wheat, sugar, vegetables and cotton – for its industry and to handle inflation. But trade being normalised is a far cry for now, unless of course India’s heart begins to melt at the sight of Shehbaz Sharif at the helm in Islamabad.
Given Pakistan’s economic, political and security compulsions, it would naturally like to cool things down with India. But that is no reason for India to play ball, at least not without getting Pakistan to deliver on some of her asks.
India has withdrawn the Most Favoured Nation status to Pakistan. A 200% tariff has been imposed on all Pakistani products after the Pulwama terrorist attack. This means Pakistan can’t export anything to India. It would be nothing short of a blunder for India to take a U-turn on this policy only to improve the atmospherics and not get anything substantial in return except for insincere statements.
Trade with Pakistan brings nothing to the table. When trade was stopped in 2019, India’s exports to Pakistan were around $2 billion which today is around 0.25% of total exports of goods and services. Simple fact of the matter is that Pakistan needs trade with India because buying cotton from any other place reduces competitiveness.
Even on connectivity, Pakistan needs India if it wants to become a bridge between South Asia (which is nothing without India) and Central Asia. There is virtually nothing in it for India to make any concession to Pakistan to incentivise it to open trade and provide connectivity.
Restoring MFN should be on the condition of reciprocity. None of the old games of Pakistanis of giving a ‘MFN-like status’ should be acceptable to India. On the connectivity issue, India should make a cold calculation on its utility. Does India really want/need land connectivity to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and beyond? Are we ready to give Pakistanis land access to Nepal or Bangladesh?
As for upgrading diplomatic relations, it was Pakistan that broke things and it is Pakistan that must fix it. To expect India to make concessions so that Pakistan can fix its mistakes makes very little sense, even less so on an issue like Kashmir. Pakistanis and their backers in the US and UK want India to surrender its vital national security interests for the sake of Pakistan. There is some talk of at least restoring Article 35A to reassure the Pakistanis.
But aside from the fact that Article 35A was unconstitutional and surreptitiously inserted in the constitution, there is absolutely no political or diplomatic rationale for restoring it. The domicile law in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir is quite restrictive anyway and will prevent any demographic change. In the last three years since constitutional reforms in J&K, how many people have received the domicile of the UT?
There is some talk among the usual suspects in India who love to bat for Pakistan that India needs to engage Pakistan for her own security. They point to the threat of a two-front war (China-Pakistan) and the terrorism challenge after the Talibanisation of Afghanistan. But this is a specious argument. If war breaks out with China, there is no guarantee that Pakistan will stay out of it. In fact, it will try to capitalise on it.
As for terrorism, the Pakistanis face a two-front situation of their own. Pakistan’s western borders are once again disturbed. Terror attacks by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and ISKP are rising by the day. With security commitments rising on the western borders, the last thing Pakistan needs is a hot eastern border with India. This means that the ceasefire along LoC is in their interest.
It also means they will like to not ratchet up violence in J&K beyond a certain point because they know that India will retaliate and force them to beef up security along LoC, which can only be done by pulling out troops from the West. They will keep terrorism in Kashmir on sim but won’t engage in adventurism. Add to all this an empty treasury which makes even ceasefire violations unaffordable.
Given Pakistan’s economic, political and security compulsions, it would naturally like to cool things down with India. But that is no reason for India to play ball, at least not without getting Pakistan to deliver on some of her asks. The thing is that even baby steps – diplomatic relations being upgraded, trade opening up, some relaxation in travel, some political and diplomatic consultations both on Track I and Track II – might not be taken before the next election which could be held around September/October this year or even early next year.
Rather than jumping the gun, India should wait and watch what happens in Pakistan. The next army chief will be in the saddle only by the end of November. Let us wait and see what his policy is going to be. Wil he and his organisation be ready to smoke the peace pipe? Or will they prefer to beguile India with fake sincerity and false promises only to get India to cut some slack for them at the time when they are caught between a rock and a hard place.
Time is on India’s side. We have Pakistan on the ropes. The last thing India should do is rush in to engage the Pakistanis at this stage.
Sushant Sareen is a Senior Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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