When the Foreign Secretaries of India and Pakistan meet in New Delhi on February 25, the challenge before them is to craft an agenda and a schedule for continuous interaction despite each having a very different set of immediate priorities. For India, ensuring sustained and effective action against terrorist groups based in Pakistan is the one issue that tops all others. Pakistan, on the other hand, is most concerned about water-related disputes, a relatively new ‘core issue’ in the already fraught bilateral relationship. The fact that Islamabad wants to talk about water does not square with its demand for the immediate resumption of the composite dialogue, since the latter includes just one of many current and future disputes, the Wullar Barrage-Tulbul navigation project on the Jhelum river. To that extent, India’s proposal for an open-ended agenda for the Foreign Secretaries’ meeting actually provides the two countries a more flexible format for official interaction on the issues that really animate them than the formal dialogue process which still lies suspended.
Saturday’s terrorist attack in Pune may or may not be the handiwork of Pakistan-based groups but the target and timing of the bomb blast have clearly been designed to evoke a comparison with the strike that took place in Mumbai in November 2008. The fact that, at a rally in Islamabad on February 5, a Jamaat-ud-Dawa spokesman threatened to target the Maharashtra city is also a reminder of the unfinished business Pakistan has to attend to on the terrorism front if it wants to build confidence and trust with India. In the absence of such confidence, talks can and should continue but it is hard to see how meaningful progress can be made on the water issue. India is not violating the Indus Waters Treaty and if Pakistan thinks it is, going for international arbitration is always an option. But as the upper riparian, there is much that India could do on its territory to develop and recharge the Indus river basin, which straddles the two countries. As the lower riparian, it is in Pakistan’s interest to seek Indian cooperation in a joint venture of this kind. That would require winning India’s trust, which, in turn, would require ensuring that the tap of terror is not just turned off but dismantled. In her meeting with her Pakistani counterpart, the Indian Foreign Secretary can do no better than to repeat what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in Parliament last year: that India is prepared to meet Pakistan’s concerns on water or any other issue more than half-way provided Islamabad implements its commitments and acts against terrorist groups.
Keywords: India-Pakistan, Foreign Secretaries, Manmohan Singh, bilateral relationship, terrorism, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, 26/11, Mumbai terror, composite dialogue, Indus Waters Treaty
There is just one core issue which had strained the relationship between India and Pakistan in the initial years after independence and sustained the strain through several decades and that issue is the dispute over the status of Kashmir. Wars between the two countries and whatever talks they might have had on the dispute have not settled the matter. The reason is that the two neighbours have from the very beginning taken firm positions on the status of Kashmir. This situation however has not helped the people of the two countries in anyway. As matter of fact the stand-off between them on Kashmir has been the main reason for their governments' spending of huge amounts of money year after year for decades to build and renew their military infrastructure. Because of the patriotic connotation of the stand of the two governments, the people and opinion makers in both countries have never questioned such huge military spending. But both countries cannot afford to let this highly expensive stand-off between them to continue for ever. However, the successive governments of neither country seem to have realised this. It will be the duty of enlightened opinion makers in both countries to come out of the false patriotism trap and make their respective rulers realise the illogic of their approach to the Kashmir issue and the need to do some new thinking on the problem.
A very balanced and well written article. However, I wonder how much Pakistan's civilian leadership can yield? Success of talks depend on this. Hope good sense prevails and Pakistani leadership shows some courage to dismantle anti-India terror infrastructure. Though, I must add that odds of this happening are as good as odds of al-Qaeda becoming a cultural organization, and winning the Nobel peace prize.
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