Now is the time to walk the talk
It was a busy day for Nawaz Sharif: Two brief and informal meetings with Chinese President XI Jinping and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, an address to the SCO summit where Pakistan is in the process of getting full membership, and finally, the meeting with Indian PM Narendra Modi, which was the longest and attracted a lot of media attention overshadowing the other two meetings.
Xi and Nawaz talked about the value they placed on relations between China and Pakistan. As the meeting between Sharif and Ghani was taking place within days of result-oriented talks between the Taliban and Afghan government, it assumed additional importance. Sharif extended an invitation to Ghani to jointly inaugurate with him the Ministerial Conference of the Heart of Asia Process to be hosted by Pakistan in December. There was no immediate response from the Afghan President.
The meeting with Modi had to be extended to almost an hour. It came a month after Modi claimed in Dhaka of India’s role as a liberator of Bangladesh and Islamabad accused India of promoting terrorism in Pakistan. An Indian border guard had been shot by a sniper from the other side a day earlier with India claiming that this was the third incident of the sort within days.
The meeting however went well. There were a number of agreements. National security advisers of the two countries were to meet in New Delhi to discuss issues connected to terrorism, yearly meetings were to be held between DG BSF and DG Pakistan Rangers, followed by that of the two DGMOs to resolve border tension. It was also agreed to expedite the Mumbai incident trial. Both leaders condemned terrorism in all its forms and agreed to cooperate to eliminate this menace. Modi agreed to visit Pakistan next year. While sections of Indian media started point-scoring soon after the talks, the question that needs answer is whether the decisions would ease the prevailing tension between the two countries or would they soon resume their too common mudfest and border clashes? Nawaz must be credited for keeping calm and sticking to the peace route despite obvious provocations from New Delhi. Modi, too, should take a leaf out of his book and ensure the process, from here on, is as free of unnecessary rhetoric and border clashes as possible.
