The real (US) pressure will probably not come until after the September-October elections. However, once a new government is in place and Clinton begins to prepare for his projected trip to South Asia, pressure will mount for an "expeditious resumption and intensification" of the process, in order to show him something tangible when he arrives. We may not call it mediation, but we are quite in the middle of it.

We need to be soberly skeptical regarding the dominant interpretation in India that the joint statement is some unalloyed victory for us; that a new watershed has been reached in Indo-American relations; that Pakistan is henceforth isolated in the comity of nations; that Sharif is similarly isolated within Pakistan; that the civilian government is paying for the blunders of the Pakistan Army, and so on ... The US position is likely to be much closer to the plan that Benazir ... Benazir still aspires to return to Pakistan as Prime Minister, and it is most unlikely that she would publicly present a plan for which she has not already obtained considerable support from policy-making institutions in Pakistan as a whole ...

The general principle Benazir proposes is that of what she calls "deliberate, incremental advance", so that the hardest decisions are left to an indefinite future. The plan itself has the following components:

1. "The two sections of Kashmir should have open and porous borders. Both sections would be demilitarised and patrolled by either an international peacekeeping force or a joint Indian-Pakistani peacekeeping force."

2."Both legislative councils would continue to meet separately and on occasion jointly" but "none of these steps would prejudice or prejudge the position of both countries on the disputed areas."

3."The borders ... would be opened for unrestricted trade, cultural cooperation and exchange ... leading to "the creation of a South Asian Free Market zone."

4. "Only after all of these confidence-building mechanisms" and a "significant set period of time would the parties commence discussions on a formal and final resolution to the Kashmir problem."

She ends her short piece with the words of warning:

"The clock is ticking. The time to act is now." It is plausible that the Pakistan Army staged the Kargil action so that the ticking of the clock may get a bit louder, for all to hear ... By the middle of summer 1998, insurgency in Kashmir had come substantially under India's control and Pakistaa, the inferior military power, had no means to expedite the pace. Then we gifted them Pokhran-II, nuclear parity, competitive weaponisation, When Kargil exploded, the world sat up to listen to their case on Kashmir in a way it had not done in a long time. And we were the ones who had to run for cover, begging the superpower to intervene on our behalf and feeling grateful that it had been even-handed.

... Once the dust settles, the government will prevail in arguing that the Kargil operation has helped "internationalise" the Kashmir issue, bringing the day of "liberation" closer. Even the Islamicists will have to come along, just as the BJP has been able to silence the Vishwa  Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Bajrang Dal and so on by assuring them that the day of the building of the Ram mandir in Ayodhya is drawing nearer.

... An extraordinary consensus develops, all the way from L. K. Advani, against whom charges are about to be framed for his role in the Ayodhya demolition, to Rajeev Dhavan, a lawyer of impeccable liberal credentials and well-deserved repute, that Pakistan was a "rogue state", "terrorist state" and so on, forgetting that no one demanded that India be declared a "rogue state" when a government here was supporting the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) or when a Prime Minister colluded in letting loose Bhindranwale upon the country itself ...

Meanwhile, the clock shall go on ticking, louder and louder, because it now has nuclear energy infused into it. (Source: The Frontline, 30 July, 1999)