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Former Indian Foreign Secretary M.K. Rasgotra has made the startling claim that India and Pakistan were on the verge of signing a peace treaty in July 1984, when some U.S. lawmakers convinced President Zia ul-Haq to drop it. In his memoir, A Life in Diplomacy, Rasgotra says Zia had even dismissed any need to discuss Kashmir.
Armed with carte blanche from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to negotiate with Pakistan, he went to Islamabad in 1982 and told Zia that India was willing to discuss Kashmir as part of the peace negotiations, Rasgotra writes. Graciously Zia replied, “Rasgotra Sahib, what is there to talk about Kashmir? You have Kashmir and we cannot take it. I want you and (Pakistani Foreign Secretary) Niaz Naik to work on a Treaty of Peace and Good Neighborliness including a No War Pact,” Rasgotra now recounts.
Zia, who had ousted Prime Minister Zulifikar Ali Bhutto in a 1978 military coup and had him executed, had by 1982 consolidated his power and was running the country with an iron fist. After the 1979 Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan, Zia emerged as a key player in the U.S.-backed opposition to the Soviets.
Negotiations appear to have extended over a period of two years and in March 1984, Naik proposed merging the Indian draft of a Treaty of Peace and Friendship and Pakistan’s draft of a No War Pact. By May, there was “full agreement on all the six or seven clauses in the draft treaty’s preamble and also on nine out of the eleven articles of the treaty’s operative part,” Rasgotra says, adding that the two remaining clauses were also agreed upon.
Naik announced he would get Zia’s approval as soon as the president returned from a visit to the United Arab Emirates, and the agreement would be signed in July 1984 in New Delhi, he writes.
Naik sent the text of the agreement to Pakistan Foreign Minister Sahabzada Yaqub Khan who was visiting Washington, D.C., according to Rasgotra. Khan “took the text around to his friends in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives, who strongly advised him against signing a treaty of that kind with India,” Rasgotra asserts, and cites as proof a call he got from a lawmaker on Capitol Hill, who was his friend and a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, “asking me why we were coercing Pakistan into signing an anti-American treaty!”
Rasgotra, who was foreign secretary from 1982 to 1985, blames the failure to sign a treaty on members of the U.S. Congress rather than the Administration and does not say if they were acting on behalf of President Reagan’s Administration or elements in it.
News India Times spoke to former State Department officials who handled the South Asia desk, and experts who researched South Asia during that period. They all were aware of the bilateral discussions between India and Pakistan to reach an agreement.
Most of them dismissed Rasgotra’s claims that U.S. politicians scuttled the treaty the two South Asian neighbors were reportedly on the verge of signing.
“I knew something about these (India-Pakistan) talks taking place ‘behind the scenes’ or like ‘secret talks’ – on how to improve the bilateral relationship,” said Walter Andersen, then a State Department official, and currently director of the South Asia program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. “My impression was it never got to the point of an agreement.”
He nixed Rasgotra’s contention that some members of the U.S. Congress could have influenced Yaqub Khan or the Pakistani President against the treaty. “He should know that foreign policy is made by the executive and not the legislature in the U.S. Also, at that time, U.S. policy favored some kind of reconciliation between India and Pakistan,” Andersen said. He discounted the idea that any such talks would be seen as ‘anti-American.’
“This is ‘old-think’ within the Indian establishment – that somehow the U.S. was inclined to destabilize South Asia; that the U.S. wanted to undermine India,” Andersen argued. The U.S. policy since the 1960s if not earlier, favored improving India-Pakistan relations and resolving the Kashmir issue through peaceful means, he said.
Ambassador Teresita Schaffer, a career diplomat and expert on South Asia, echoed Andersen’s views. “I’m skeptical of the whole story,” she told News India Times. She called “strange” the view that any treaty between the two traditional enemies would have been seen as against U.S. interests. Both Schaffer, and her husband Howard Schaffer, who was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs from 1981-84, said they would be “very surprised” if such an agreement had indeed been in the offing between the two countries.
“We knew Sahabzada Yaqub Khan very well, we saw him in action. We are very skeptical he would have shared (the treaty) with lawmakers and not with the administration,” Schaffer said. “And if he (Khan) had shown it to the (U.S.) administration, Howard (Schaffer) would have seen it,” as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the region, Teresita Schaffer said. “Sahabzada would have gone to his buddy Larry Eagleburger,” she added. Eagleburger was Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs 1982-84.
The U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan from 1983-86, Deane Roesch Hinton, now 93, also could not be reached. According to a summary of his 2015 book, Economics and Diplomacy: A Life in the Foreign Service of the United States, “In Pakistan President Zia lied to Ambassador Hinton about his plans for nuclear weapons, which Zia balanced by lying to the Soviets about his and U.S. support for the mujahadeen.” The book was not readily available.
Some of the staunchest supporters of Pakistan at that time were Rep. Charlie Wilson, D-Texas, who died in 2010, and Rep. Dan Burton, R-Indiana, who could not be reached for comment.
Professor Harold Gould, a researcher on India since 1954, says, there could be truth to Rasgotra’s contention about negative signals from the U.S. on an India-Pakistan deal. “Most of this was taking place in the first term of the Reagan administration. That’s a critical factor. The posture of the Republican administration in its first term was very Cold War oriented,” Gould said. It would not be surprising if in that ethos, the U.S. administration was against an India-Pakistan peace treaty, he said.
Some staunch supporters of Pakistan, like Wilson and Burton, espoused a Cold War ideology, Gould pointed out. “It’s not surprising to me that they might have taken the position that Pakistan should not have a conciliation with India because New Delhi was pro-Soviet,” Gould surmised. There would not have been much difference between the in-group in the White House, and some lawmakers, he contended. Any agreement with a Soviet “fellow traveler” like India could have portended a softening in Islamabad’s stance toward Soviet Union at a time when Washington’s main goal was containing that Communist country, Gould said.
“In the first term (of the Reagan administration), India was seen as pro-Soviet so its plausible that some in the U.S. spoke out against the detente,” said one South Asia expert who had followed bilateral relations between India and Pakistan at that time and did not wish to be identified.
“It was clear that there was an opening to India,” the expert said. “Zia was for it because of the fear of being attacked.” Later Zia ul-Haq had told a State Department official, that the reason the treaty fell through was because India had changed its own proposal, the expert said.
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