Why Sushma Swaraj's visit to Pakistan is bad for Modi
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is playing a high-stakes gamble with his overtures to Pakistan. It may be diplomatically correct, but politically, it is akin to holding a red hot ember in bare hands hoping that it won't singe the holder.
Diplomatically, Modi is going by the rule book which says that all neighbours have to be kept engaged and in that sense he is doing nothing wrong by a renewed diplomatic push to open doors of talks with this adversarial neighbour.
Against this backdrop, the world will be waiting with bated breath to see if indeed he sends his foreign minister Sushma Swaraj to Pakistan to attend a 29-nation Heart of Asia conference in Islamabad on December 8-9, an invite from Pakistan that has been pending for a month.
But it looks rather strange and out of place to upgrade the level of engagement with Pakistan and send foreign minister to Islamabad when two attempts at lower levels of foreign secretary and National Security Advisor (NSA) have failed since August 2014.
The Modi government's intentions look noble, but at the policy level, the move to open up to Pakistan by playing cricket with them and sending foreign minister to Pakistan, albeit for a multilateral event, does not jell.
If the above two events do take place, the Modi government will find it hard to answer what has changed at the ground level to warrant these two initiatives since India unilaterally cancelled the foreign secretary-level talks in August 2014.
A pertinent question is when attempts to engage with Pakistan failed at junior levels of foreign secretary and NSA, what purpose will it serve by elevating the engagement level to the foreign ministers?
The Modi government cannot be unaware of these fault lines and that's why it has not announced Sushma Swaraj's Pakistan visit so far. If Sushma has to travel to Pakistan, she has to do it within a specific time frame which is December 8 or at the most December 9.
Perhaps, the Modi government is playing it by the ear. Perhaps it wants to make the formal announcement about Sushma's maiden Pakistan visit as foreign minister just a day or few hours before her departure for Pakistan so that only a handful Indian journalists reach Pakistan to cover the visit.
The reported vibes about an impending thaw in India-Pakistan cricket relations is another baffling move.
As said earlier, the Modi government will find it hard to explain what has changed in last 18 months to reverse its earlier decision of not playing cricket with Pakistan till the neighbour permanently shut down its India-centric terrorism activities.
PM Modi must be aware of Pakistan's continued intransigence. Modi may be finding himself staring at India's Agra summit moment when the then Vajpayee government badly burnt its fingers by going ahead with the Agra summit without doing the customary home work.
The correct political and diplomatic route to engage with Pakistan will be to start talks at the foreign secretary level. Sending foreign minister Sushma Swaraj to Pakistan, even if for a multilateral event, will be fraught with dangerous consequences.
After all, Sushma Swaraj's Pakistan visit, if it happens, will inevitably turn into a mega event and raise expectations to feverish levels.
It is up to the government to decide whether it wants to run its Pakistan policy on the basis of shallow optics or sound, structured policies with proper home work.