India and Pakistan: The Latest Diplomatic Debacle
Neeta Lal | 23 Jul 2010
NEW DELHI -- Indian External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna's three-day visit to Pakistan last week to move the bilateral Composite Dialogue forward will be joining a long list of Indo-Pak diplomatic debacles, the most recent one being at Sharm el-Sheikh last July.
However, even by the abysmal standards of Indo-Pakistani diplomacy, the public spat between Krishna and his Pakistani counterpart, Mehmood Qureshi, at the joint press conference in Islamabad on July 15, marks a new low in bilateral engagement.
It has also raised a fundamental question about India's foreign policy toward its neighbor, one that is deeply dividing an already fractious Indian polity: Should India continue to view Pakistan merely as an adversary to be contained? Or should New Delhi drastically recraft its approach to instead cultivate Islamabad as a "friend"?
The crucial Pakistan-India foreign ministers' meeting was handled clumsily by both sides, beginning on the eve of the talks, when Indian Home Secretary G.K. Pillai directly linked the Pakistani military intelligence service, the ISI, to the November 2009 Mumbai terror attack.
The debacle continued in the joint press conference following the meeting. Trouble began when Qureshi drew a parallel between Pillai's remarks and the anti-India hate speeches delivered by Hafiz Saeed, the head of Pakistani terror organization, Jamaat-ud-Dawa.
That led an outraged Krishna to reject any comparison between the two. "Saeed is a person who . . . has been trying for jihad against India, and we have always said that such people in Pakistan who incite anti-India propaganda will not help smooth our relationship," he stated.
Soon afterward, Qureshi launched a personal diatribe against his Indian counterpart at a solo press conference, accusing Krishna of showing up without any clear mandate to negotiate. The Indian foreign minister had apparently come to Islamabad "unprepared," according to Qureshi, and "kept phoning back to India for instructions."
Krishna rejected the charge, calling it "extraordinary."
The talks themselves were a classic case of "ambush diplomacy," a tactic increasingly employed by Pakistan to ruffle India's feathers in foreign policy matters. Tossing aside weeks of preparatory work by both sides, Pakistani officials asked India to sign up for a "time-bound solution" to Kashmir. When Krishna stuck to his mandate by placing terror at the top of the agenda, it was dubbed it as "Indian intransigence" and highlighted as the reason for the failure of the talks. Qureshi also said that New Delhi appeared unwilling to commit to a roadmap for future engagement.
Primary among the confidence-building measures New Delhi is seeking before embracing Qureshi's priorities are assurances on no further terror attacks by Pakistan-based terror groups as well as tangible action against Pakistani citizens identified by David Coleman Headley, the American citizen held in connection to the Mumbai terror attacks.
However, the inflexible positions taken by both sides and the lack of empathy for each other's core concerns proved to be the biggest stumbling blocks in achieving more promising results. Far from bridging the bilateral schism, the foreign ministers' talks only widened it, thereby squandering the perfect opportunity to break the post-Mumbai impasse and move their dialogue forward.
On the contrary, the meeting led to a severe backlash in India, with opposition parties demanding that the Indo-Pakistani dialogue be suspended immediately. Why bother with a dialogue at all, they argue, if neither side is serious about the deliverables? "The UPA government should not talk to Pakistan till it stops terrorism," thundered Syed Shahnawaz Hussain, spokesperson for the main opposition party, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), at a press conference in New Delhi recently.
"Decades of dialogue has failed to make any dent in Pakistan's basically hostile outlook toward India," said another opposition member.
However, moderates argue that breaking off talks at this stage would be a huge mistake. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, for one, is of the firm belief that sustained dialogue is the only way to bring about normality in the near term with Pakistan.
According to a foreign ministry source, however, the Pakistani civilian government's struggle to assert its authority over multiple power centers within and outside its establishment is complicating the bilateral agenda. That has forced India to deal with the complexity of a sharply divided Pakistani leadership and society.
Optimists believe that when the dust settles, some good may eventually come out of the diplomatic fiasco, since it might force both nations to consider what changes are needed to restart the peace process. One option is to eschew the archaic Composite Dialogue template altogether, replacing it with something new. New Delhi could also try to engage the Pakistani army -- which is a stakeholder in most of the prominent topics of discussion -- directly, perhaps by including representatives of the military in future talks. Given that India continues to be anathema to the Pakistani high command, this may well be the perfect ice-breaker, although the challenge would be to promote such military-to-military confidence-building measures without undermining the civilian government in Islamabad.
In any event, given the geopolitical stakes involved, neither Islamabad nor New Delhi can afford to be deflected by atmospherics. An all-or-nothing attitude by either side would be deeply counterproductive and could jeopardize the peace process.
Neeta Lal is a New Delhi-based journalist, formerly with the Times of India and editor of the Asian Age Sunday Section. Her work has appeared in numerous U.S., Asian and European print and Web-based publications.
Photo: Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, June 2009 (Photo by flickr user Current News Stories, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License).
