Despite the militants’ monkey wrench
The prime ministers of Pakistan and India have been meeting each other but not really often enough. When Dr Manmohan Singh meets Mian Nawaz Sharif on Sunday in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly’s annual gathering, this would be the fourth time in as many years that an Indian PM shall have parleys with his Pakistani counterpart – but this meeting has come after an interregnum of three years since the SAARC summit in Thimphu, Bhutan in October 2010. Another post Mumbai feature: such one-on-one between the PMs has only been on the sidelines of one international summit or another – the other two instances being Yekaterinburg and Sharm-el-Sheikh. After multiple incidents of killings on both sides of the Line of Control (LoC) in recent months that each army blames on the other, and the double militant attack on a police station and an army post in Jammu on Thursday that killed at least nine people, there was much speculation that the summit will not take place at all. The timing of the latest militant attack smacks of a sabotage. Such unpleasant episodes have been taking place with frightening regularity whenever there was some prospect of a positive, forward movement in Pakistan-India relations – and have mostly been successful in blowing away the thaw, reversing it to deep freeze. The double Jammu strike by militants definitely looks like an attempt at throwing a monkey wrench at the anticipated New York tête-à-tête.
It is a good thing that this time round the Indian PM has turned a deaf ear towards the belligerent elements in Indian polity and media and refused to shy away from the rendezvous. While condemning “the heinous terrorist attack”, Dr Singh’s stance was: it “will not deter us and will not succeed in derailing our efforts to find a resolution to all problems through a process of dialogue”. Yet the incident is bound to cast its shadow on the talks. Will there be a substantive headway in putting the composite dialogue – suspended since the Mumbai terror attack – back on the rails is a point of conjecture. Most likely it will not. Talking to the media at the UN, the Indian Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid said: “Primarily we will see whether the dialogue process that started between the two countries, that stopped and got derailed, can that be brought back on track.”
Before the Indian elections, little headway is expected on major issues, for the Congress would not like to surrender its slim of prospect of returning to power for the third time on the bounce to a resurgent BJP, which electorally thrives over its aggressive anti-Pakistan posture. But the meeting is significant despite it being a given that anything dramatic in the context of improvement of relations cannot realistically be expected. Attempts in that direction however must continue, and the best way to stay on that path is for leaders of both countries to keep on talking.
