Why talking to Pakistan is futile
That Pakistan can issue stamps to highlight human rights abuses in Kashmir shows the depth of its establishment’s animosity towards India.
After announcing that the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan would meet in New York during the forthcoming UN General Assembly session, India has abruptly called off the meeting because of the brutal murder of three J&K policemen by the Pakistan-linked Hizbul Mujahideen — with the clear aim of making the law and order situation in the state as unmanageable as possible — and the Pakistan government’s egregious conduct in issuing 20 stamps glorifying terrorists, including Burhan Wani.
Army matters
Imran Khan or no Imran Khan, Pakistan’s agenda to destabilise Kashmir from within remains intact and, despite international pressures, it will not sever its terrorist links.
That Pakistan can issue stamps to highlight human rights abuses in Kashmir shows the depth of its establishment’s animosity towards India.
Cancelling the meeting makes sense because a dialogue will remain unproductive until Pakistan is ready to cure its 70-year-old Kashmir obsession and look at India not through the prism of Islam, but as a modernising state that looks outside religion for its political, economic and social progress.
That Imran Khan wants to create a welfare society in Pakistan based on the Medina model speaks for itself.
Pakistan’s reaction to the cancellation is revealing.
Its information minister has argued that the new government is very close to the military, that Imran Khan’s initiatives have its full backing, and that whatever the government says has the full endorsement of the armed forces and vice-versa.
According to him, this creates a favourable ground for exploring normalisation.
What he describes as a positive is in fact a negative because the Pakistani military wants tight control over the civilian government’s initiatives towards India and confine them to the bounds prescribed by it.
This leaves little scope for positive moves to meet India’s concerns about terrorism and bringing to justice those responsible for the Mumbai mayhem or the Uri and Pathankot attacks.
The armed forces would have to back this decision, and if they did, it will be viewed as succumbing to India’s pressure. On curbing LeT, HuM and Hafiz Saeed, in particular, the information minister has been evasive and has frivolously argued that both sides should have interest in making those groups who favour peace in both countries stronger rather than strengthening those who are against talks, marking once again Pakistan’s reluctance to acknowledge the problem of the free rein it gives to jihadi groups.
Its Supreme Court has now refused to ban the activities of LeT’s two charity organizations, designated as terrorist entities by the UN. The minister has reiterated that a move forward on Kashmir as the nucleus of all problems would be required to progress on other issues. All this throws into relief the old position on Kashmir of the ‘Naya Pakistan’ that Imran Khan wants to create.
Discussing terror
India is clear-sighted enough not to believe that Pakistan’s willingness to discuss terror at the aborted Sushma Swaraj-Qureshi meeting promised any breakthrough, given that the two sides have discussed —without any tangible success — the terrorism issue since the mid-1990s as part of the Composite Dialogue and subsequently through the back-channel between the National Security Advisers of the two countries under the Modi government.
Pakistan, too, accuses India of terrorism, capitalising on the Kulbhushan Jadhav saga and our own past ineptness in including the Samjhauta Express incident in our joint statements and even a reference to Baluchistan that implicitly recognised Pakistan’s concerns. When Pakistan expresses its readiness to discuss terrorism, it is to put its own counter-accusations on the table and not allow itself to be subjected to one-sided pressure.
Our thinking in accepting the meeting could well have been to scotch any propaganda advantage Pakistan could derive internationally from our rejection of its ostensible “peace move”. Some abroad and many more in India have been in favour of giving Imran Khan a chance. Not that we should be too worried about external opinion as a country that has suffered from Pakistan’s unremitting hostility since its creation and its terror onslaught against us since the mid-1980s.
Strong language
Our pro-Pakistan lobby, which unfortunately includes professionals who have dealt with Pakistan, can also be ignored as their facile arguments in favour of engaging Pakistan undermine the government’s position, benefit Pakistan and damage our national interest.
Nevertheless, so long as we have diplomatic relations with Pakistan and we ourselves do not treat Pakistan as a terrorist state and want to keep the channels of communication open, some diplomatic manoeuvring would have appeared justifiable.
The government was right that a meeting did not mean a dialogue but that kind of semantic distinction is lost on the general public which would see in the meeting a willingness to engage Pakistan once again, particularly as the meeting followed an exchange of letters between the leaders of the two countries.
In announcing the cancellation, our spokesperson has used uncharacteristically strong language to denounce Pakistan’s “evil designs” and the rapid unveiling of Imran Khan’s “real face”, stating that any conversation with Pakistan in this environment would be meaningless.
This should foreclose any political-level meetings in the foreseeable future. More so as the morally pretentious, djinn believing, libido-driven, crypto-Islamist, terrorism-protective leader of Pakistan has characterised the Indian decision as arrogant and its leadership as “small men occupying big offices”, with the country’s information minister provocatively bringing in the Rafale controversy to explain India’s turnabout.
(Courtesy of Mail Today)