Pleasant Bangkok Surprise

The dramatic meeting between the National Security Advisors of India and Pakistan and their foreign secretaries in Bangkok has broken the longstanding logjam over the dialogue between the neighbours. And this happened just when we had all but given up on the hope of an Indo-Pak engagement for the foreseeable future, what with New Delhi’s redlines on Islamabad’s consultations with Hurriyat and the discussion on Kashmir making talks almost impossible to take place. But both the countries have gotten around the redlines by conceding a little to accommodate each other’s concerns. India has come around to discuss Kashmir by holding a simultaneous foreign secretary level dialogue on the state and the parleys in a third country has obviated the need for Pakistan to consult Hurriyat. The discussions have “covered peace and security, terrorism, Jammu and Kashmir and other issues, including tranquility along the line of control”. The two sides also agreed to carry forward “the constructive agreement”. The closely-guarded four-and-a-half hour long meeting between NSA Ajit Doval and his Pakistan counterpart Nasir Janjua, also paved the way for the foreign minister Sushma Swaraj’s Islamabad visit for a regional conference on Afghanistan on December 8 and 9.  The meeting came days after a brief huddle between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Pakistan counterpart Nawaz Sharif in Paris on November 30, which was followed by instruction to the officials  to find a practical way to break the diplomatic stalemate. Now Swaraj’s visit to Islamabad is expected to take the process forward.

From here on, things look promising. If the two countries are able to sustain the new thaw, the engagement could well culminate into Modi’s visit to Pakistan in 2016 to attend SAARC summit.  But for now, there is a need for the two countries to pick up the thread from where they left off. Ever since  the productive 2003-07 engagement between the neighbours broke with the sudden exit of president Musharraf in early 2008, the two countries have struggled to get the dialogue back on track. The engagement which was drastically set back by the 2008 Mumbai attack has only been restored in fits and starts – no sooner would talks start than they would fall apart.

Why talk about the state of affairs over the past seven years, the situation over the past one and a half year has been no less uncertain. Ever since Modi took power in May last year, there have been two last minute cancellations of the scheduled dialogue – first between foreign secretaries and then between NSAs. This despite the fact that the talks had been fixed following the understanding between Modi and Sharif in their meetings in New Delhi and Ufa. Does such a fate await the new engagement too? There is every possibility that the talks could fall through yet again. That is, if the two countries don’t safeguard the process against its familiar pitfalls: for example, there is no scope for the preconditions from either side, nor should dialogue be susceptible to terrorist incidents. This will help sustain the talks. Second, for the dialogue to be successful the neighbours have to pursue in good faith the solution to all pending issues. They can hardly afford to ignore Kashmir which has been the root cause of their lingering bitterness. There is no other way to put the demons of a bitter history to rest.

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