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| Little chance of breakthrough in Indo-Pak ties at SAARC meet | | |
ABID SHAH
NEW DELHI, JAN 29: As the top level deliberations are on among India’s leaders here regarding the question of participating in the conference of Home Ministers of SAARC countries being hosted by Pakistan, beginning February 20, indications are that the two countries may try to maintain the quiet that the Union Home Minister P Chidambaram often favours in case of talks with the separatist Hurriyat leaders.
Hopes regarding breaking the ice by India and Pakistan vis-à-vis their relations are far from encouraging. And Chidambaram’s visit is yet to get Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s nod.
The delay in this is obviously because a delegation from a few Pakistani dignitaries including their Chief Election Commissioner called off its visit to New Delhi recently because of a row over selection of Pakistani cricketers for IPL events in India.
In case the Home Minister is at all able to attend the three-day conference, the Pakistanis would indeed try to engage him in talks. This has been indicated through yesterday’s interview given by Pakistan Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani to an Indian TV channel since Gilani made a strong plea for the resumption of dialogue between the two countries irrespective of the atmosphere that got vitiated by about 14-month-old terrorist strike on Mumbai.
Gilani has once been able to bring Manmohan Singh round Pakistan’s point. And the Pakistan Prime Minister talked of this in his yesterday’s interview by metioning his Sharm el Sheikh interaction with Manmohan Singh in July last year. But Chidambaram was quick to assert India’s stand yesterday itself by saying that Pakistan has not so far been forthcoming in bringing the culprits responsible for 26/11 attack on Mumbai to justice to make it clear that for any serious dialogue India would like Islamabad to first act on this.
Besides this what belies the possibility of a serious engagement between India and Pakistan in near future is also Gilani’s claim in response to a question through the interview that “… there had been some irresponsible statements from Army Chief of India. There’s tension because of that. At the same time it’s an indigenous movement in Kashmir that does not have anything to do with Pakistan. We are too busy in our own matters. We want a resolution of the Kashmir dispute.”
These are remarkable words since the Pakistan Prime Minister uses the term indigenous where India too thinks that it has been trying to find an indigenous solution to the Kashmir problem which has been becoming difficult because of outside support coming from across the borders. Thus the diverse standpoints taken by India and Pakistan with regard to Kashmir remain as such. And this makes the possibility of finding a solution to the problems between the two countries all the more bleak.
And given the internal situation of Pakistan that keeps it “too busy” with its “own matters”, it poses a problem for India despite this being an internal problem of Pakistan. It is simply that any negotiator from India would like to ask himself as to whom should it talk to in Pakistan, meaning whether one should talk to civilian leadership, or the real power wielding army generals of Pakistan, or the religious leaders of the country, or their cohorts like Taliban.
The limited authority of elected leadership of Pakistan throws a dilemma for anybody who wants to seriously engage with Pakistan. And, thus, the scope of any breakthrough coming from a visit to Pakistan by Chidambaram or any other Indian leader appears to be quite limited at least for the moment.
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