Give Indian diplomacy a sliver of an opportunity to shoot itself in the foot and it will. The move to relax visa regulations between India and Pakistan announced at the recent ministerial level tête-à-tête in Islamabad is a faux pas; one that increases India’s vulnerability, and burdens a security apparatus already reeling under the assault of a myriad of inimical forces that include home-grown terrorists and a deluge of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. It is an open invitation to Pakistan-based terrorists to walk freely into India through legal channels.
True, nations at loggerheads need confidence-building measures (CBMs) like this visa agreement to defuse tension. But CBMs need to be reciprocal for the process to have any meaning. Additionally, in the case of India and Pakistan, it is India that has been at the receiving end of Pakistan-based terrorist attacks and a Pakistan-supported insurgency in Kashmir. Therefore, rationally speaking, it is Pakistan that needs to put forward proposals that evoke confidence from India and not the other way round.
Unfortunately, despite India’s extra effort, there were no peace offerings from the Pakistani side: only more stalling tactics with Pakistan’s foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar holding up the delay in the Samjhauta blast case (allegedly the handiwork of Hindu militants) as a counterfoil to the deliberately sluggish pace of the 26/11 trial in Pakistan.
Peaceniks in India may welcome the visa agreement as a boost to people-to-people contact, but this is a naïve and blind assessment of the ground reality that militates against all logic. Artists and cricket players from Pakistan have been welcomed in India with open arms for many years now. Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, a Pakistani singer, musically rules the hearts of millions of Indians. With such open mindedness on our part, we should have seen more tangible results from Pakistan. In the complex dynamics of Pakistan’s internal power hierarchy, the quantum of public goodwill towards India is too small or even pharisaical and carries too little influence to bring about a paradigm shift in Pakistan’s policy towards India. We need to understand that fuzzy notions like goodwill and CBMs are not endpoints in themselves; they need to ensure our national security to be valid.
Pakistanis visiting India for medical treatment or to view a cricket match routinely do the disappearing act; the number who remain untraceable after entering India legally has increased over the years: 4,742 Pakistanis disappeared in 2005, 5,392 in 2006, 6,038 in 2007, 7,547 in 2008 and 7,691 in 2009. While the majority of those missing are harmless, some do carry a security connotation. In his interrogation by the NIA, Pakistani-American terrorist David Headley revealed that his handlers Abdur Rehman and Sajid Majid (alleged masterminds of the 26/11 attack) visited India in 2005 on a reconnaissance mission under the guise of being cricket fans travelling to India for a match.
With the new visa regulations extending the length of stay and allowing Pakistani citizens greater mobility within India, it makes the task of tracking down delinquent individuals even more difficult, compounding our security dilemma. Moreover at a time when intense patrolling along the Indo-Pak border coupled with advanced technology has made cross-border infiltration more and more difficult, this visa agreement comes as an unnecessary retrograde step that negates the logistic gains made by our army and security personnel by providing our detractors with an alternate route.
People from Pakistan genuinely seeking to visit India for furthering familial ties, to trade or to avail of our medical facilities can easily be accommodated under the existing rules. This new laxity only opens up the floodgates for abuse by terrorist and trouble-mongers and will only make a bad internal security situation worse; in short a self-mutilating decision.