The announcement by the Indian government in early February that it was ready to start talking with Pakistan again has been hailed by the international community as a positive move. Domestically, barring the dissonant voices from the Bharatiya Janata Party and its smaller right-wing allies, the move has been generally welcomed.
The terror blast in Pune on February 13 has not derailed the meeting of Foreign Secretaries scheduled for February 25. External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna, reacting to the Pune incident, said that the dark forces of terrorism are against peace and amity between the two neighbours. The Indian government has reiterated that the talks will go ahead. At a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) held a few days after the explosion, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao was asked to raise the issue during the talks in case evidence of a foreign hand emerged.
New Delhi, anyway, had already let it be known that it would prefer the focus of the scheduled talks to be the threat posed by cross-border terrorism. The CCS stressed that the future of the talks depended on Pakistans willingness to discuss terrorism emanating from within its borders. Islamabad, meanwhile, has signalled that it wants the talks to continue within the format agreed on in 2004, when the two countries resumed their dialogue after a long break. In the composite dialogue that followed, all outstanding issues between the two countries, including Kashmir, were discussed.
India has said that it wants the new round of talks to be open-ended so that all issues affecting peace and security can be discussed. Indian officials, however, emphasised that the predominant issue for them would be counter-terrorism. Pakistani officials have said that they will not allow the dialogue process to be bogged down in the issue of the format of the talks. At the same time, they would be pushing for discussions on all the major issues.
The current stance of the Indian government is in marked contrast to the hard-line posture it adopted until very recently. Senior officials in the External Affairs Ministry were ruling out talks until late January. Terrorism and negotiations cannot go on together. Pakistan has to do much more for the dialogue to resume, said an official. Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram stated that Pakistan was not doing enough to combat terrorism on its soil. He went on to add that Islamabad would be held accountable for any new acts of terror on Indian territory.
According to observers, many factors have influenced the sudden reversal of the stance New Delhi adopted after the Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008. The most obvious one is the growing American pressure to resume the dialogue process. A host of leading United States officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, have been visiting India to pile on the pressure. Its Af-Pak envoy, Richard Holbrooke, too made a couple of trips to New Delhi to persuade India to go back to the negotiating table.
It is no secret that the U.S. considers the Kashmir issue an important factor in the ongoing efforts to find a political and military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan. Senior American officials have been saying that the tensions between India and Pakistan are seriously undermining the U.S. war efforts. President Barack Obama is due to visit India in the middle of this year.
The London Conference on Afghanistan, held in January, may also have influenced the thinking of the Indian government. The conference was a diplomatic morale-booster for a beleaguered Pakistan as the international community acknowledged its key role in Afghanistan. Islamabad also successfully lobbied to deny New Delhi a meaningful role in the diplomatic efforts under way to bring peace to Afghanistan. India was not even invited to the recent Istanbul summit on Afghanistan because of pressure from Pakistan. India knows the only way it can edge into the Afghan dialogue and hope to influence the Taliban negotiations is to first reopen the diplomatic channel with Pakistan, the international security company Stratfor noted in a recent paper.
The Pakistan government has been loudly complaining that because of Indias military belligerence and stonewalling of talks, the Pakistan Army is being forced to fight a war on two fronts. Senior Indian government officials have warned on several occasions that another terror attack on its territory could mean war. In a speech made in December, Indian Army chief Gen. Deepak Kapoor said that the country had to be prepared for a two-front war, with China and Pakistan, and this gave Pakistan another reason not to withdraw troops along the Indian border and deploy them in the fight against the local Taliban. Gen. Kapoor had also made the alarming claim that the possibility of a limited war under a nuclear overhang is still a reality, at least in the Indian subcontinent.
Pakistan Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani told the Pakistani media in early February that though the army was alert to the threat posed by local militants, it would remain an India-centric institution unless Kashmir and the water issues were resolved. Pakistan has been claiming that dams built by India have seriously affected the flow of water into the Indus valley. In a meeting held in Lahore in the second week of February, officials of the two countries agreed to hold further talks on the issue in March and May this year in order to expedite the pace of dispute resolution.
Gen. Kayani said that peace and stability in South Asia should not be made hostage to a single terrorist act by a non-state actor, referring to the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Other complaints of Islamabad against New Delhi relate to the alleged support provided by India to separatist elements in Balochistan and the Indian role in Afghanistan. All these factors, coupled with Indias status as the predominant regional power, have added to Pakistans growing sense of insecurity. Pakistan Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani said recently that his country too was facing Mumbai-type attacks. We cannot protect our own citizens. How can we guarantee that there wouldnt be any more terrorist hits on India? he said.
In a survey released in the third week of February, a United Kingdom-based risk assessment agency, Maplecroft, listed Pakistan third and India sixth in its annual Terrorism Risk Index. Robert Gates, during his visit to New Delhi in January, warned that Al Qaeda and regional terrorist groups aligned to it were determined to incite a war between the two nuclear-armed Asian neighbours. Indian and Pakistani leaders will meet formally at the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit in April in Bhutan. A favourable diplomatic climate will go a long way in making the summit a success. According to reports, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his new National Security Adviser Shiv Shankar Menon were in favour of a resumption of the dialogue process.
The sudden about-turn by India has been welcomed warmly by the U.S. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State P.J. Crowley acknowledged that the U.S. had been encouraging steps that both India and Pakistan could take to address mutual concerns and to take appropriate steps so that tensions can be reduced. Crowley added that dialogue between India, Pakistan and Afghanistan was key to achieving stability in the region. This shows that the Obama administration views India-Pakistan relations and the Kashmir problem as being inextricably linked with the ongoing war in Afghanistan. It wants to exit from Afghanistan with minimum collateral political and military damage, and Pakistans role is crucial to achieve this. The U.S. wants the Pakistan Army to focus all its energy and firepower on the Afghan front.
Washington has also been trying to reassure New Delhi that it is not once again tilting towards Islamabad. U.S. officials accompanying Gates during his India visit said that their country viewed India as a regional and an emerging world power. Gates even expressed his understanding of the Indian position on terror attacks, which New Delhi claims are either instigated or organised by Pakistan-based militant groups. I think it is not unreasonable to assume that Indian patience would be limited if there are further attacks, he added.
Another prominent U.S. visitor to New Delhi was the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry. After a meeting with Manmohan Singh on February 15, Kerry said the Foreign Secretary-level talks between India and Pakistan should proceed as scheduled despite the Pune incident. He said if there was evidence of a Pakistani hand in the Pune bombing, then it should be the first thing on the table during the talks.
The Pakistan Prime Minister told Kerry in Islamabad that his government had once again offered to enhance intelligence sharing with India after the Pune blast. He said that the blast was part of the terrorist agenda to derail bilateral talks between the countries.
