NEW DELHI, Nov. 28 (UPI) -- Pakistan's new foreign minister, Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri, and I went to the same Cambridge college, Trinity Hall, over the same years, 1961-63, and we have been friends ever since.
Khurshid was at the airport to receive me when I transited through Lahore on being posted to Karachi as consul general of India in December 1978. He knew Lahore was my birthplace and took the trouble to locate Lakshmi Mansions, where I was born.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that although Lakshmi is the name of a Hindu goddess, Islamic Lahore had not attempted to change the name. Even if Pakistan was created on the basis of the theory that Hindu and Muslims constitute separate nations, I was delighted the symbiotic nature of Indian civilization, to which Muslims as much as Hindus have contributed its culture of unity in diversity, continued to flourish in a country whose political establishment goes to great lengths to erase the common roots of our shared heritage.
During my three years in Karachi, Khurshid and I met often and our families vacationed together in the summer in the hill-station of Murree. His home has been my home every time I have visited my birthplace.
Indeed, I was with him in his house when he romped home to a significant victory in the February 1997 elections to the Pakistan National Assembly. He thought then he might get appointed minister of state for external affairs. That did not happen, but he now has the higher prize, Cabinet Minister for Foreign Affairs.
I last met him in Lahore when I crossed the land border at Attari-Wagah to attend the wedding reception of his son in August 2001.
Khurshid has been to India several times as an activist in Track II diplomacy aimed at exploring the areas of possible accommodation between India and Pakistan to resolve their festering quarrels. He now has the opportunity of translating into policy the perceptions of his earlier incarnation as a promoter of India-Pakistan goodwill.
Of course, no minister has the freedom to hoe his own furrow. He will have to carry his colleagues with him, and in a system as short of democracy as Pakistan is, the shots will be called by President Pervez Musharraf and his military inside circle.
I have always felt it would be better to deal with those who are the real rulers of Pakistan, the military, than rely on the impotent promises of the civilian leadership.
Until Pakistan becomes a genuine democracy -- which cannot happen till Pakistan ends the pervasive feudalism of its land-holding order -- it does not really matter who holds the stage as the titular ruler of the nation. The real power is always with the army. So, why not deal direct with the army than through the intermediation of a puppet civilian regime?
We have seen through the years that "democratically" elected Pakistani prime ministers seek to prove their credentials as true leaders of their nation by being more hawkish than even their military puppeteers.
Indeed, when any civilian prime minister does take any initiative that goes beyond the diktat of the military, he or she is either pulled back or overthrown.
Conversely, if somewhat perversely, when the military is in power in Pakistan, some element of forward movement is possible. The paradox needs illustration.
Until Gen. Ayub Khan's military coup of 1958, the issue of Kashmir was stuck in the rut of posturing at the United Nations. Nor was there any movement toward the self-evident need to divide the waters of the Indus basin for the benefit of agriculturists on either side of the border.
Gen. Ayub appeared ready to do something about Kashmir but Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru died on May 27, 1964 even as his emissaries, Gandhian leader Jayaprakash Narayan and detained former prime minister of Jammu & Kashmir, Sheikh Abdullah, were in Pakistan talking to Ayub and the Pakistani military establishment.
What this aborted initiative could have led to has to be left to the speculation of historians. As a poet once wrote, "Of all sad words of tongue or pen/ The saddest ones are these: it might have been!"
But the enduring monument to sound India-Pakistan relations remains the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 finalized during Ayub's tenure. It has withstood three major wars and several skirmishes.
The Green Revolution, in Pakistan as much as in India, which ended famine in both countries and is now making both emerging exporters of food grains in world markets, is the direct outcome of that treaty. And it took a military man in Pakistan to sign it.
The next military dictator of Pakistan, Gen. Yahya Khan, was a disaster for both Pakistan and India, although he was the prime beloved of President Richard Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger.
After Pakistan was defeated in the India-Pakistan War of 1971, which led to the emergence of Bangladesh, the former East Pakistan, as a separate country, the civilian leader of Pakistan, then known as the chief martial law administrator, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, journeyed to Simla, the former summer capital of British India in July 1972. There he signed with Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi the historic Simla Agreement which, three decades on, continues to be the bulwark of India-Pakistan relations.
The understanding between the two leaders was that Bhutto, on returning to Pakistan, would set in a process which would eventually lead to the conversion of the cease-fire line in Kashmir into an international border, thus ensuring the "final settlement," as the agreement said, of the Jammu & Kashmir issue.
Unfortunately, Bhutto reneged on the understanding, whether because he was a feckless "democratic" leader or because the military turned the screws on him, we do not know.
Gen. Zia-ul-Haq overthrew Bhutto in July 1977 and later hanged him. However much revulsion against Zia the hanging provoked in both countries, the fact is Zia, as a military ruler, went out of his way to promote a honeymoon between the two countries.
Alas, he was so flawed by his reputation as a medieval hangman that he never established the stature to be a credible interlocutor in India-Pakistan relations. He was killed in what appeared to be an engineered air-crash in August 1988, which also took the life of the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan of the time.
Zia's 11 years in power were years of fruitless endeavor but, for all that, years of endeavor, validating my hypothesis that for India the Pakistan armed forces are a more reliable interlocutor than the civilian establishment.
Bhutto's daughter, Benazir, had two spells as prime minister. In her first term, she and Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi quickly established a rapport that held the promise of a new era in the sub-continent.
Tragically, every initiative Benazir took in her first term was thwarted by the military, leading, in her second term, to her trying to prove herself more extreme than the armed forces by fostering large-scale cross-border terrorism against India. This set off a proxy war that continues to this day.
Benazir at least has had the grace to admit the greatest mistake she made as prime minister in her second term was to spurn India's hand of friendship.
She was followed as prime minister by Nawaz Sharif and the failure of the 2000 Lahore summit between him and current Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee still casts its shadow over the current grave tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.
The Pakistani army undermined the Lahore Declaration within weeks of its being signed and spawned an invasion across the disputed Line of Control in Kashmir.
A few months later, not only was the Lahore Declaration dead, Sharif himself had been overthrown by the Army commander, Gen. Musharraf, who continues to be the authority in Pakistan. He has a civilian government in office after an election stage-managed by his military. And now Khurshid is foreign minister.
Now, my memory goes back to the evening that Khurshid and I sat next to each other that first evening in the Trinity Hall college dining hall more than four decades ago, equally bewildered by the array of cutlery we needed to learn to use.
Although it was a period of the usual high tension in India-Pakistan relations, it was always possible to discuss the relationship reasonably and calmly with Khurshid. When he returned to Pakistan with degrees from Cambridge, Oxford and the Middle Temple under his belt, it was not the law but politics which claimed his first attention.
He quickly emerged as the favored right-hand of the leader of the Tehrik-e-Istiqlal, or Justice Party, Air Marshall Asghar Khan. But Asghar Khan always remained a moral rather than political force -- a champion of lost causes. And his somewhat impractical high-mindedness in politics is very much mirrored in Khurshid's personal and political lifestyle.
There is nothing fanatical about him. He is a thoroughly modern-minded man, as secular as it is possible for a practicing Pakistani politician to be, certainly with no prejudices to taint his personal attitude to his neighbors across the border.
So, in Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri, India has a Pakistani foreign minister we can deal with. He will never sacrifice his country's interests to personal friendship but he will treat with us, I believe, in an honest, straightforward way, without resorting to wile or guile.
I hope our government has the good sense to avail of the opportunity to put India-Pakistan relations on track. The only way of doing so is to begin with low-key talks about talks aimed at so structuring the dialogue as to insulate it from the inevitable ups and downs in our daily relationship.
For the dialogue to succeed, it must be made uninterrupted and uninterruptible. Persistence -- probably over several years -- is the key to a successful outcome. By then, Khurshid might not still be foreign minister, but he would have set the ball rolling.
-- Mani Shankar Aiyar is a member of the Indian parliament representing the Congress Party. His column appears weekly.
