C Raja Mohan writes: A time for para diplomacy

More practical than reworking the territorial disposition of the Punjab boundary or erasing the Line of Control in Kashmir is changing the nature of these frontiers that have long been zones of military confrontation and not commercial cooperation. That is why the push for cross-border trade with Pakistan is important. The SAD also demands reopening the Attari and Hussainiwala borders with Pakistan for trade and tourism to usher in economic prosperity.

The problem here is not with India but with Pakistan. Over the last few decades, the Pakistan Army made it clear that it has no interest in economic cooperation with India until the Kashmir question is sorted out to its satisfaction. On the trade front, Pakistan has never given the MFN status to India. Delhi, which gave that status to Pakistan, withdrew it in February 2019 after the terror attack in Pulwama. When India ended the special constitutional status of Jammu and Kashmir in August 2019, Pakistan suspended all trade ties. For a moment in February 2021, when the two security establishments negotiated a ceasefire agreement, Pakistan signalled interest in resuming trade ties;
but there was too much opposition and then Prime Minister Imran Khan shelved the move.

More recently, the government of Pakistan led by Shehbaz Sharif highlighted the demand from the Pakistani business community to reopen trade ties with India.

While businessmen across the border were making a sensible commercial case for resuming trade, Pakistan’s establishment is not sure if this can be done because there is so much other baggage that overwhelms common sense on Islamabad’s ties with Delhi.

The next government in Delhi will, of course, have a chance to take a fresh look at bilateral ties and pick up the threads of engagement from February 2021, when an incremental process of restoring reasonable ties was apparently discussed between the two sides. The new government in Delhi could also look at an interesting proposal from the SAD—the call to make the entire Punjab border into a “special economic zone”. The SAD wants to work with Delhi to bring small and medium enterprises into this zone.

It will be interesting to imagine what such a zone could do for India-Pakistan relations when there is freer trade and economic cooperation across the Punjab border. Imagine also Pakistan setting up a similar free zone on its side of the border and the possibilities for integrated development.

Are we now getting ahead of ourselves? Perhaps, but unexpected positive developments do occur between India and Pakistan. Few had expected that the two countries would translate the long-standing idea of the Kartarpur Sahib Corridor between the two Punjabs into a reality during 2018-19. The idea of a transborder economic zone is not entirely outlandish. It was discussed often in the context of developing economic cooperation across the Pak-Afghan border; it did not go far amidst the turbulence in the bilateral relationship. It is unlikely to get much traction now amidst the deepening conflict between the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistan army. However, the idea of trans-border economic zones has considerable traction in South East Asia. Elsewhere in Asia, China has actively encouraged its frontier provinces to embark on cross-border collaboration with neighbouring countries.

The ideas put forward by the SAD, in essence, reflect the interests of a people who have paid a high price for the partition of the Punjab. The SAD’s proposals on engaging Pakistan bring to the fore the idea of “para diplomacy” or “sub-state diplomacy” in promoting national interests. This involves formal interactions between entities below the federal level — provincial and local governments — in pursuit of shared national goals.

The conduct of para diplomacy is not in opposition to the national governments, which have a monopoly over the engagement with other sovereigns. Federal governments are quite nervous about sharing, let alone ceding, authority to engage across borders, especially when there is a danger of cross-border criminal and terror networks casting a shadow over the process. Para diplomacy, conducted in tandem with the central government, can often produce openings that can’t be generated between the congealed positions of the national governments.

India and Pakistan in their on-again, off again peace process over the last quarter of a century have occasionally encouraged substate diplomacy in Punjab. There were occasions when the chief ministers of east and west Punjab met to explore mutually beneficial cooperation. However, those fledgling initiatives could not survive the intensity of the conflict at the national level.

Not all Indian border states have been as keen on cross-border cooperation as Punjab. The context on each border is different with unique burdens of history and different degrees of political difficulty. West Bengal, under Mamata Banerjee, for example, had, in fact, complicated Delhi’s engagement with Dhaka.

The Tamil parties in Chennai have often exercised their veto over Delhi’s ties with Colombo. A weak UPA government (2004-14) had to often walk back from productive initiatives with the neighbours because of resistance from its coalition partners in the states. A strong NDA government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi began with the talk of “cooperative federalism” but is locked in a conflict with non-BJP governments in the frontier provinces that prevents productive collaboration on neighbourhood policy.

The next government, irrespective of its political colour, must return to reconsidering para diplomacy as a valuable tool of India’s statecraft. To succeed, India’s neighbourhood policy must work with the interests of the people in the border provinces. This, in turn, demands the construction of a consensus between the centre and the regional parties in the border provinces on developing a productive relationship with the neighbours.

The writer is contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express and visiting professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore