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| Foreign Secretaries have their sight on world gallery missing concerns back home | | |
ABID SHAH
NEW DELHI, FEB 25: Today India and Pakistan did talk to each other at their top most diplomats’ level here and possibly may do so in future also at the same and other levels may be here again or a city in Pakistan. Yet the hangover cast by past bitterness between the two neighbours ominously loomed large before the two sides. So much so that this lingers through even after over three-hour-long talks were concluded.
And some may say that this may become further grim, given some of the sharp remarks made through nearly an-hour-long rambling by the visiting Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir at a Press briefing called by Pakistan High Commissioner Shahid Malik.
Most critics watching today’s parleys at New Delhi’s Hyderabad House and subsequent Press statements by Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao and her Pakistan counterpart attribute the lack of any significant departure from their respective past positions to their hard set stands on terrorism and Kashmir where both sides remained unrelenting.
Former Secretary in the External Affairs Ministry KC Singh called it the same-old-and-worn-out “litany” where Pakistan with hardly any amends wants to hear India’s complaints regarding 26/11 and other terrorist attacks masterminded from inside Pakistan while trying to get away by saying that Islamabad too has been a victim of terrorism and may be a worse victim.
Indian and Pakistani positions have been so prefixed since even before the talks today that they tried to show through this to the world, mainly the West that matters the most before them, that terror and Kashmir cold be marketed as their best bet irrespective of their consequences that include often covert besides three overt full-scale wars that the two have thus far fought.
Instead, had India and Pakistan ever looked inwards, they would have come out of their woes more easily and South Asia or the subcontinent could have been in a far better shape today. The relationship between them was best described by one of the critics who says that the two countries are like a divorced couple that sometimes have to interact because of their over a billion children, read citizens, who live perennially caught in between their chidings and skrimishes.
Today’s interaction was hardly any different though the optimists may count on the possibilities like intelligence sharing that came in for discussions today. There is no better optimist to be found on the Indian side who always looks for better days in Indo-Pak relations than the former diplomat Mani Shankar Iyer who had a stint in Islamabad in Indian High Commission. It has been his doctrine to have mechanisms in place to deal with border issues, intelligence use and to look into humanitarian issues on both sides of the borders.
Had Salman Bashir kept Iyer’s exhortations in mind, he would have been more restrained than what he turned out to be today at the Press conference which led critics and diplomats on the Indian side to call him “belligerent”. This has been mainly because he described an Indian dossier on terror masterminds inside Pakistan as more of a “literature” than evidence though he retracted from this while answering mediapersons questions. Yet the damage was done.
He said that Indo-Pak relations should not be allowed to become hostage to anyone or a few incidents, causing consternation in New Delhi. Such assertions have taken the attention away from some of the good things he had to say and threatened to put Indo-Pak relations in reverse gear again.
Often deadlock in Indo-Pak interaction which was, indeed, broken today for good is not exactly the case since the two neighbours are often said to be talking through media. But when the visiting Secretary opted to continue this today, the discourse seemed to be hardly poised for any change belying millions’ expectations.
A news channel interviewed today Union Home Minister P Chidambaram who has of late been dealing with Kashmir on this side of the border which Pakistan calls to be its core concern. Salman Bashir did mention certain CBMs – or confidence building measures – arrived at in the past which led to set out a bus service between the two sides of Kashmir which still plies. Yet he remained short of acknowledging this being unilaterally continued where even amnesty to the youth who crossed the borders in the heat of insurgency is among the things that India has put on the block.
Not just the visiting Foreign Secretary but Hurriyat too has been not only silent about this but almost ready to reject it. The leading lights of the separatist Hurriyat had met Bashir last evening and they were happy with the conviviality of the occasion and the invitation that was offered, rather renewed, for their visit to Pakistan. Yet the question is whether these leaders are serious about those who want to come back to India from across the line of control to join their folks back home in Srinagar, Baramula, and Sopore.
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