After India has stopped swooning over Pakistan’s new foreign minister, the focus will shift to more substantive analyses – what was said, what was not said and what should have been said. Pakistanis (the majority of them) are delighted with the way their foreign minister wowed the Indians with her glamour and her brains.
The general opinion is that the foreign minister has made a great debut and that the dialog has gone well – probably because expectations were not very high given the overall environment in which the talks took place. That they took place at all is by itself a great achievement for both countries and a signal that the dialog process is at last transcending orchestrated disruptive events and identifying these for what they are. So when the suave, savvy and senior Indian foreign minister says that ‘ties are back on the right track’ and the joint statement indicates a commitment to ‘keep the peace process going’, these have meaning and significance.
In today’s globalised world where the focus is on economic prosperity, trade, investment and cooperation, it is a compulsion for long time antagonists like India and Pakistan to seek bilateral understanding and build trust. This is not the time for taking asymmetries and ambitions to such levels that they become regional security problems and trigger responses. In fact, asymmetries require that the country at an advantage reassures the one at a disadvantage. It would be shortsighted to gloat or exploit. The talks have set the right note by not letting the elephants in the room become show stoppers – the elephants of course being Kashmir, Afghanistan and terrorism. So when the Indian foreign secretary said that there was ‘awareness of deep differences’, she was signifying that the elephants had been seen and accepted.
The fact that the Pakistani foreign minister met the Kashmiri leadership before the talks did much to reassure both domestic and Kashmiri public opinion even though this move is being criticised in India with the view that such a meeting in Delhi would not have been possible if it was not ‘grand fathered’ by India. If this was the case then it certainly helped the dialogue to move forward and focus on an improvement in the Line of Control environment with new agreed steps. Hopefully, future talks can tackle demilitarisation and ending the futile standoff in glaciated Siachen. The joint statement also outlines a commitment to fight militancy and boost trade – long overdue steps if the process of normalisation is to move forward.
The Afghanistan situation, in the wake of vastly improved India-US relations, did lead to the perception that India was angling for space that would be there once the US and NATO withdrew and that a US-India grouping would push Pakistan to China.
This balancing arrangement reminiscent of the Cold War era can be a factor if the US creates the environment for it by not balancing its bilateral relationships in the region and by not building up sufficient capacity in Afghanistan to ward off external inroads. This is something India and Pakistan need to discuss and resolve so that it is competition and cooperation and not confrontation that drives policies. Unless this happens regional security and harmony will be in jeopardy.
When Pakistan’s foreign minister talked of a ‘mindset change’ to usher in a ‘new era of cooperation’, she really laid out the track for future interaction. She is being unfairly called the ‘military’s choice’ when it is clear that she is there on merit – something that will become increasingly evident in the future. The mindset she refers to encompasses all. The implication being that subjects that have been off the table, like nuclear restraint and deterrence, will have to be discussed if the negative consequences of conventional force asymmetries are to be avoided. India and Pakistan could then have joint positions on many issues in multilateral forums.
A conclusion that can be drawn from the positive Khar-Krishna talks is that India and Pakistan can make this dialogue a process for constructive engagement on all issues and even if the progress is slow it will still steer away from conflict and confrontation and towards more and more cooperation. The fragility in the process will go away once it is sustained and made robust.
Spearhead Analyses are the result of a collaborative effort and not attributable to a single individual.
