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

The vocal opposition in Islamabad to Bilawal’s visit, the first by his foreign minister to India in more than a decade, underscores Pakistan’s deep internal divisions over its foreign relations at a critical moment in world politics. Although Bhutto arrives here to participate in the deliberations of a multilateral organization, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, run by China, a close partner of Pakistan, the ideologues in Islamabad consider it sacrilege even to visit India.

The lack of agreement on India is only part of Pakistan’s foreign policy problem. The biggest struggle has been finding a sustainable approach to Pakistan’s engagement with the major powers that are at odds with each other: the US, China and Russia. Islamabad also faces new challenges in Afghanistan and is struggling to cope with changing geopolitical dynamics in the Middle East.

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

Part of the problem has been Bajwa’s endless meddling in domestic politics. He helped install Imran Khan as prime minister in 2018 and decided to unseat him in 2022. He ousted Nawaz Sharif on shaky grounds in 2017 and allowed the Sharif family to return to the mainstream in 2022. Whatever his damaging legacy in domestic politics, Bajwa sought to reorient Pakistan’s foreign policy and made a lot of effort to improve ties with India. But to say, as his critics in the media do, that he was selling himself to Delhi it’s laughable

Although veteran journalists claimed to have leaked the details of an off-the-record Bajwa briefing a couple of years ago, his attempt to compromise and reduce tensions with India was no secret. The general outlines of his approach were public knowledge after Delhi and Islamabad announced a ceasefire agreement in February 2021. This came after tensions rose following the Pulwama terror attack and The walls Indian Air Force bombing and Pakistani response in Feb 2019. India’s constitutional changes in Kashmir during Aug 2019 made Pakistan go crazy. He cut ties with India and insisted that Delhi must reverse the Kashmiri changes before they can resume talks.

Bajwa soon recognized the futility of this approach and tried to end the deadlock in bilateral relations. The ceasefire agreement was the product of informal talks between India’s national security adviser Ajit Doval and Bajwa. The ceasefire was to be followed by various confidence-building measures to ease tensions between the two countries. One idea was to resume overland trade between the two countries. Imran Khan, who had approved the decision as trade minister, overturned it a couple of days later as prime minister.

Imran had calculated that the political costs to him of normalizing ties with India were too high, and Gen Bajwa was unable to persuade him to think otherwise. But the claim that Gen Bajwa was sold in Kashmir does not stand up to scrutiny. The joint statement issued by the Directors General of Military Operations on February 25 explicitly says that the two sides will resume talks on their main concerns: Kashmir and cross-border terrorism, respectively for Pakistan and India.

Had things gone according to script, the ceasefire could have kickstarted 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 continually clean up after his foreign policy misadventures.

Imran’s anti-American stance saw ties with Washington deteriorate. His enthusiasm to be seen in Moscow the day Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine outraged Europe and the United States. Imran also sought to align himself with Turkey as it sought to wrest leadership of the Islamic world from Saudi Arabia and sparked fights with the United Arab Emirates. This, in turn, undermined Pakistan’s traditional goodwill in the Arab Gulf. Today, Turkey is normalizing ties with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, while Pakistan finds itself sidelined in the Middle East.

Bajwa’s moves to reduce tensions with India were part of a broader effort to modify Pakistan’s foreign policy. It was an acknowledgment 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, geo-economy and good-neighborly relations underscored the case for urgent correction of Pakistan’s strategic course.

But the demons the Army has unleashed over the past five decades — jihad addiction, empowerment of religious extremism at home, and letting Kashmiri rhetoric overwhelm pragmatic considerations — were hard to wish for. They had entrenched themselves in Pakistan’s national headspace.

To make matters worse, Imran Khan made these demons his own. In the past, it was the Pakistani Army that quashed efforts by civilians to normalize ties with their neighbors. Now it was Imran Khan who nullified the army in India.

Though out of power, Imran’s dominance of street politics has severely limited the space for the current civilian ruling coalition, which includes Zardari’s People’s Party and the Sharifs’ Muslim League, to take bold new initiatives toward India.

Pakistan will need a lot of time and space to organize its internal play and rebuild a foreign policy consensus. Is there anything India can do until then? A priority for Delhi must be to maintain the valuable back channel to the army leadership in Rawalpindi. As weakened as it is, the Pakistan Army remains India’s only credible interlocutor in the short term.

The author is a Senior Fellow of the Asia Society Policy Institute, Delhi and a Contributing Editor on International Affairs for the indian express