Rhetoric can’t drive India-Pakistan ties
As India’s election campaigns heat up, one can only hope that whims — and the incendiary bluster that often accompanies them — do not ignite a conflagration
Judging by the unsavoury exchanges between the Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers at the recent United Nations General Assembly, the already deeply troubled bilateral relationship has reached a new low.
What immediately preceded the UN session was bad enough. Less than 24 hours after agreeing to a bilateral meeting of foreign ministers on the margins of the General Assembly, India cancelled, citing the killing of three Indian police officers on their shared border and Pakistan’s issuance of a postage stamp honouring a slain Kashmiri terrorist.
But such border incidents — including both killings and retaliation — are not new; several have already occurred this year. And while the stamps were certainly an unpleasant manifestation of Pakistan’s chronic glorification of anti-India violence, they were issued in July, a month before Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan — whose new government proposed the bilateral meeting — was even sworn in.
The Indian Foreign Ministry’s allegation that these incidents exposed Imran’s “true face” was a mere fig leaf — and a churlish one at that. In fact, with a general election six months away and five state elections set to take place before the end of this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government simply did not want a meeting with Pakistan at a politically sensitive moment.
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) appears to have decided to contest the upcoming elections on a hardline Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) platform.
This reading is reinforced by Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj’s use of the UN podium to deliver a political campaign speech in Hindi to BJP voters back home. In it, she lambasted Pakistan and mentioned Modi twice as many times as she referred to India, on whose behalf she was supposed to be speaking.
This is not to say that Imran’s government has been a paragon of diplomacy. Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmoud Qureshi has taken a bizarre and damaging approach, alleging, for example, that Pakistan is under siege from Indian “terrorism” — a phenomenon that no objective international analyst has yet recognised.
Can the supposedly responsible governments of two nuclear-armed countries sink any lower?
Unfortunately, it seems entirely likely. In Pakistan, Imran’s government, anointed by the Pakistani military, will progressively consolidate power. In India, election fever is heating up under a government that has not hesitated to politicise the military and often substitutes marketing for tangible achievements. For example, the BJP constantly boasts of cross-border raids on terrorist camps in Myanmar and Pakistan. Last month, it celebrated the anniversary of one such raid across the Line of Control in Kashmir, despite the fact that the raid had no lasting geostrategic impact. Cross-border terrorist incursions, aided and abetted by the Pakistani military, have continued in the two years since.
New dawn
Meanwhile, foreign-policy experts are wondering whether India under Modi has a Pakistan policy at all. After demonising Pakistan in his campaign speeches, Modi invited his then-counterpart Nawaz Sharif to New Delhi for his 2014 inauguration, raising hopes — reinforced by exchanges of shawls, saris, and even sentimental letters to each other’s mothers — of a new dawn in bilateral relations.
Less than two months later, India and Pakistan were exchanging artillery fire across the still-sensitive border.
It is true that many Indian officials have found it frustrating to talk peace to a civilian government that — because the military calls the shots in Pakistan — seems unable or unwilling to deliver on any commitments. But the fact remains that India’s government lacks a cohesive policy framework for negotiating the relationship with its most turbulent neighbour, much less a compelling vision for lasting peace.
Modi’s is a foreign policy by whim, not by design. As India’s election campaigns heat up, one can only hope that those whims — and the incendiary rhetoric that often accompanies them — do not ignite a conflagration.
■ Shashi Tharoor, a former UN undersecretary general and former Indian minister of state for external affairs and minister of state for human resource development, is currently chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs and a member of parliament for the Indian National Congress.