Review of Covert — The Psychology of War and Peace: Language of peacemaking Premium

Review of Covert — The Psychology of War and Peace: Language of peacemaking. Two former spy chiefs on why India and Pakistan need to restart talks

When dealing with contentious issues between neighbours and arch enemies as India and Pakistan have grown to be, can established practices in counselling and mediation, like those used for unhappy married couples, be applied? More importantly, does the setting, venue and language of discourse matter?

During Narendra Modi’s visit to Lahore in December 2015, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif asked External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar why he preferred to speak in English. Jaishankar allegedly replied that it was because Sharif was a “foreign head of state to him”, indicating a stern formality and distance in tone. This, and other anecdotes, are cited in a new book, Covert: The Psychology of War and Peace, in which psychologist Neil Aggarwal talks to former R&AW chief A.S. Dulat and former ISI chief Asad Durrani. It’s a sequel to the 2018 Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace.

In that, journalist Aditya Sinha had conducted the conversation, and he dwelled for a considerable amount on how the language, religion, familial ties and personal aspects of the interlocutors affect their ability to engage each other.

The question on whether a common local language and personal links work should be further analysed, however. Both Prime Minister Modi and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee used Urdu in conversations with Nawaz Sharif, forging personal ties and embracing him publicly during their respective visits to Lahore in 1999 and 2015, for example. In contrast, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who was Punjabi and born in Pakistan, seldom spoke in anything but English during meetings with the Pakistani leadership, nor did he visit Pakistan during his entire tenure. Singh’s government, however, maintained a longer span of unbroken formal engagement with Pakistan (2004-2008 and 2010-2014), compared to attempts by Vajpayee (1999-2001 and 2003-2004) and Modi (2015-2016 and 2018-2019).

As a sequel, Covert is quite different from Spy Chronicles, as the earlier book probed events and dialogues between Dulat and Durrani while they were in positions of power, and for years after when they remained “in the know” of the India-Pakistan official dialogue process. The latest version dwells more on the “Track-II” initiatives the two men have been a part of for two decades. It looks at how non-formal dialogue works, and what could provide a breakthrough to take talks to the Track-I level. The format of both volumes are Q&A transcripts of hours of mediated, unedited conversations, and is sometimes tedious, and should have been re-framed; the editors may even consider a third work distilling the content of the first two books into a more reader-friendly format.

Dulat and Durrani engage warmly like before, but the narrative in Covert seems far less anecdotal and newsworthy — they may both be playing safe, given their experience with the previous book. The publication of Spy Chronicles, the first-of-its-kind collaboration between spy chiefs of two warring nations, had set off storms in both Delhi and Islamabad. Dulat faced a barrage of criticism from officials in Delhi and, after his memoir A Life in the Shadows was published, the Modi government amended its Service Pension rules forbidding officers from the IB, R&AW and 24 security services from writing books without official permission. In Islamabad, the Pakistan Army ordered a court of inquiry into Durrani’s comments in the book and put him on the Exit Control List in order to prevent him from leaving the country for a period.

The Dulat-Durrani conversations reveal that the refusal to talk is ideological and emotion-led, whereas the need for engagement is more rational and ‘realpolitik’. In a separate clinical paper titled, ‘How Psychoanalytic Theory and Track II Diplomacy Can Inform Each Other: A Dialogue with the Former Heads of India and Pakistan’s Foreign Intelligence Agencies’, Dr. Aggarwal concludes that there is a need to learn to continue talks “even when intense emotional effects such as rage threaten to interrupt dialogue”. The “ground rules” of the dialogue are simple: that the two discussants would interact civilly, listen and not interrupt the other, speak freely and empathise. Having exhausted so many avenues of engagement without much to show for it, perhaps what the two countries really need, is not more leaders, diplomats and generals, but counselling and therapy.