Khan wins praise over peace move
Pakistan airspace opened as Indian subcontinent steps back from brink
As tempers cool after an alarming confrontation between India and Pakistan, analysts say their leaders have emerged stronger – with Narendra Modi burnishing his nationalist credentials and Imran Khan cast as a peacemaker.
Some 400,000 people have signed petitions for Khan, the former playboy cricketer and prime minister since August, to get a Nobel prize, while Modi’s political stock within India has also risen ahead of looming elections.
Kashmir has been split between India and Pakistan since 1947, and two of the Asian nations’ three wars have been fought over the Muslim-majority territory.
An insurgency since the late 1980s, stoked by Islamabad, New Delhi says, in the part of Kashmir that India administers has killed tens of thousands of people, most of them civilians.
On February 14, a suicide bombing for which a Pakistanbased militant group claimed responsibility, killed 40 Indian troops. Twelve days later Indian aircraft hit what New Delhi called a terrorist training camp deep inside Pakistan.
In aerial skirmishes over Kashmir the next day, at least one Indian jet was shot down and its pilot captured by Pakistan. India said it also downed a Pakistani aircraft, a claim Islamabad denied.
As the world held its breath, Khan, 66, made the surprise announcement that the captured pilot, handlebar-moustached Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, would be freed in a “peace gesture“.
Abhinandan’s release on Friday looks to have taken the sting out of the standoff for now.
Khan’s actions disarmed his opponents in parliament and on social media alike, with The News daily noting a “rare bonhomie ... between government and opposition“.
Assuming it was Khan’s decision to free the pilot – never a given in a country where the military plays such an outsized role – “it was the first correct one of (Khan’s) political career“, tweeted Gul Bukhari, a columnist who strongly opposes the government.
Modi “looks like a war-mongering minuscule leader, while the Pakistani prime minister looks like a statesman,” said analyst Mosharaf Zaidi.
Fahd Husain, a leading analyst and executive director of The Express Tribune, told AFP he has been “very pleasantly surprised” by Khan’s attitude. “It would have been very easy for him to go the aggressive route. People would have applauded it“, he said.
Zaidi said, however, that once the dust settles, politics will be back with a vengeance.
“Pakistan has many problems: education, water, etc. And Imran Khan is the prime minister of all these problems“, he added.
No one is putting Modi forward for a Nobel but his tubthumping rhetoric has won him some much-needed political points before India goes to the polls in a few weeks.
Contrasting the more conciliatory sounding Khan, Modi has talked tough, saying that his “new India” would “fight as one” and deliver a “jaw-breaking response“.
● Pakistan fully reopened its airspace on Monday, authorities said, days after it closed its skies to all air travel, leaving thousands stranded worldwide as tensions with nuclear archrival India soared.
The decision to close the airspace came last Wednesday after a rare aerial dogfight between India and Pakistan over Kashmir ignited fears of an allout conflict.
It would have been very easy for Khan to go the aggressive route.