Dr Maleeha Lodhi :
THE LATEST twist in Pakistan-India relations has been Delhi’s cancellation of talks that were to be held between the foreign secretaries of the two countries on August 25. But this wont-talk posture did not come as a surprise because for the past decade or more this has been a characteristic feature of India’s on-off diplomatic engagement with Islamabad.
Was the latest disruption an expression of Delhi’s pique or did it indicate an effort by Narendra Modi’s government to recast the rules of engagement? Was election politics the trigger for the decision, ahead of state polls in Jammu and Kashmir?
Pakistani officials first learnt about the cancellation of talks on August 18 from an announcement by India’s Ministry of External Affairs. This followed a phone call by the Indian foreign secretary, Sujatha Singh, to Pakistan’s High Commissioner, Abdul Basit, who was then meeting a Kashmiri leader and was to meet other leaders the next day.
It was conveyed in the phone call that Pakistan had to decide whether to engage with India or Kashmiri “separatists” and that if the Pakistani envoy went ahead with the meeting, talks in Islamabad would be called off. No sooner had this telephone call ended than the Indian media began reporting the cancellation of talks.
There was nothing unusual about meetings between Pakistani diplomats and Kashmiri leaders. They are a longstanding practice to which successive Indian governments never objected. Such consultations are routinely undertaken ahead of Pakistan-India talks, as also happened this time.
Delhi voiced no complaint when Kashmiri representatives visited Pakistan’s High Commission on July 19. In fact after this, on July 23, Ms Singh telephoned Pakistan’s foreign secretary to fix their meeting for August 25. Delhi’s decision to scuttle the talks, therefore, raised questions about whether the cited reason was just an alibi to disguise other motives.
One interpretation is that Modi’s decision was driven by upcoming state assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir. The BJP has made ‘Mission 44-plus’ its campaign plank – aimed at winning a majority in the 87-member assembly. It may, therefore, have calculated that its electoral strategy would be bolstered by cancelling talks with Pakistan.
Delhi’s decision elicited considerable criticism within India itself. One publication called the cancellation reason “laughable”. Another described it as a “self-goal.” Others described the cancelled talks as “collateral damage” of the BJP’s election strategy for Kashmir.
Whatever the Modi government’s motives in aborting the Islamabad talks, the decision sent atleast three signals. One, that Delhi is in no hurry to renew, much less accelerate, the normalisation process including trade ties, preferring instead to mount pressure on Pakistan by publicly assailing it at home and in international forums.
Two, Delhi may be seeking to redefine the terms of engagement, setting conditions for Pakistan to meet for the revival of the dialogue. The ‘redefined’ terms may mean that Modi’s government is not interested in talking to Islamabad about Kashmir. And three, the Indian government might be assuming that resumption of talks can be used as pressure or as a ‘reward’ once Islamabad complies with Delhi’s “new bar” for normalising relations, whatever they may turn out to be.
The irony about this new approach is that it is anything but new. In fact, it mimics the strategy followed by Delhi in the past decade and a half in which it suspended talks at least three times and made their revival contingent on Pakistan meeting certain stipulations.
But Delhi’s start-stop approach to engagement with Pakistan since 2001 has neither yielded the outcomes it has sought nor weakened Pakistan’s positions. As an instrument of diplomatic coercion it has simply not worked. Every time Delhi returned to the dialogue process it did so in a diplomatic climb down, and not by gaining anything.
Diplomatic disruptions have also proven counterproductive to Delhi’s own stated goals and set back progress on trade and people to people contacts that India has long prioritised.
Delhi has repeatedly declined Pakistan’s offer to renew the formal dialogue after Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s assumption of power and despite his several overtures to Delhi. Then, as now, Indian officials kept talking about setting new rules of engagement. But trying to do this by a no-talks posture is a contradiction in terms.
With formal dialogue suspended and normalisation at a standstill, uncertainty is injected into the future of the relationship. This is unfortunate at a time when renewed engagement could help both countries focus on pressing internal challenges without being distracted by tensions and build a modicum of stability in the region.
(Dr Maleeha Lodhi is a former Pakistani ambassador to the US and the UK)
