JOIN USIndia-Pakistan: Towards a thaw, or another ‘false start’?
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar landed in Abu Dhabi early on April 18 – just a day after his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmood Qureshi had reached Dubai. Jaishankar had a meeting with Emirati Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan in Abu Dhabi on April 18. Qureshi too travelled from Dubai to Abu Dhabi the next morning and met Sheikh Abdullah in the evening.
The visits of Jaishankar and Qureshi to the United Arab Emirates around the same time fuelled speculation about the Emirati Government’s behind-the-scenes efforts to bring the two South Asian neighbours back on the table of negotiation. Qureshi did lend credence to the speculation, as he told ‘Gulf News’ during an interview that the representatives of India and Pakistan had “sittings” in the UAE. Neither Jaishankar, nor the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi confirmed or denied it.
The speculation about the UAE mediating between India and Pakistan has in fact been making the rounds ever since the armed forces of the two South Asian nations agreed on February 25 to stop firing across the Line of Control (LoC). Jaishankar hosted the Emirati Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah in New Delhi just a day after the Director General (Military Operations) of the Indian Army and his counterpart in the Pakistan Army had agreed to strictly adhere to the 2003 ceasefire pact.
Abu Dhabi’s envoy to the United States, Yousef Al Otaiba, almost confirmed the UAE’s role in helping India and Pakistan de-escalate tension over Kashmir and making the two neighbours agree to stop flouting the ceasefire along the LoC. He said during a virtual discussion organized by the Hoover Institution of the Stanford University on April 14 that while India and Pakistan might not become “best friend” to each other, the UAE’s goal was to make the two South Asian nations have “functional relations” with an “open line of communication”.
There have been some exchanges of positive vibes between New Delhi and Islamabad over the past few months. India allowed Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s aircraft to fly through its airspace when he had to travel to Sri Lanka on February 24, just two days before the armed forces of the two countries agreed to maintain peace along the LoC. Islamabad had in 2019 turned down similar requests from New Delhi for overflight permission for aircraft carrying President Ram Nath Kovind and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Khan said in Islamabad on March 17 that India would be economically benefited by having peace with Pakistan, which could give it direct access to Central Asia. The Chief of Pakistan Army, Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, on March 18 said that it was time for his country and India to bury the past and move forward. Modi wrote to his counterpart in Islamabad on March 23 conveying greetings on the occasion of the Pakistan Day. Modi wrote to Khan that India, being a neighbouring country, desired “cordial relations” with the people of Pakistan. Khan wrote back to Modi on March 30, thanking him for his greetings and conveying that people of Pakistan also desired “peaceful, cooperative relations” with “all neighbours, including India”. When Khan was tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection on March 20, Modi tweeted to wish for his speedy recovery. Pakistan of late also offered to provide ventilators and Bi-PAP machines to India, which was hit hard by the raging second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The formal bilateral dialogue between the two South Asian neighbours was restarted in March 2011 after the two-and-a-half-year-long hiatus following November 26-28, 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai. New Delhi suspended it again after the Pakistan Army personnel brutally killed two soldiers of the Indian Army along the LoC in Jammu and Kashmir in January 2013. Modi invited the then Pakistan Prime Minister M Nawaz Sharif to attend his swearing-in ceremony and their first meeting on May 27, 2014. But the attempts to restart dialogue in 2014 and 2015 did not succeed. The Foreign Ministers of the two nations announced the resumption of dialogue on December 9, 2015. Modi made a “surprise visit” to Lahore to greet Sharif on his birthday. But then came the January 2-5, 2016 terror-strikes on the Indian Air Force base at Pathankot in Punjab and the Consulate General of India at Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan – followed by the attack on the Indian Army’s brigade headquarters at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir on September 18, 2016 and the retaliatory “surgical strike” by India on terror camps in Pakistan on September 26, 2016. India boycotted the SAARC summit, which was to be hosted by Pakistan in November 2016. So did the other nations, forcing the Pakistan Government to call it off. The tension between the two nations escalated over the attack on India’s paramilitary soldiers at Pulwama in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) by the Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist outfit of Pakistan on February 14, 2019, the retaliatory strike by the Indian Air Force on a terror camp in Balakot deep inside Pakistan on February 26, 2019 and Pakistan’s protest over India’s August 5, 2019 move to strip J&K of its special status and to reorganize the state into two Union Territories.
The recent exchanges of positive vibes between New Delhi and Islamabad did ease the tension between the two nations a bit. But all these could just end up as yet another ‘false start’. Khan said that India would have to first make the move to restart the stalled dialogue with Pakistan. The Modi Government in New Delhi, however, put the onus back on Islamabad, stating that Pakistan would have to create conducive atmosphere for talks by taking “credible, verifiable and irreversible” action against terrorists using territory under its control for cross border terrorism against India. Khan and Qureshi said that Pakistan was ready to hold talks with India if the Modi Government rolled back its August 5, 2019 decision and restored the special status of J&K. New Delhi is learnt to have firmly conveyed to Islamabad that the Modi Government’s decision to withdraw the special status granted to J&K under Article 370 of the Constitution was endorsed by Parliament of India and irreversible. India conveyed to the UAE that Pakistan’s rhetoric on restoring the special status of J&K would in fact make it difficult for it to mobilize public opinion in favour of resumption of talks.
New Delhi has since long maintained that the 1972 Simla Agreement between India and Pakistan and the 1999 Lahore Declaration by the two sides had left no scope for the United Nations or any other third party to play any role in resolving the “outstanding issues” between the two South Asian neighbours. The Modi Government steadfastly rejected offers publicly and repeatedly made by the then US President Donald Trump in 2019 to mediate between the two South Asian neighbours. It, however, appears to be comfortable with the UAE’s informal and behind-the-scenes role to facilitate its back-channel talks with the Khan Government in Islamabad.
Islamabad started making peace overtures to New Delhi soon after Joe Biden took over as the new US President on January 20 this year. The words of Khan and the more powerful chief of Pakistan Army, Gen Bajwa, were not backed by any credible action on the ground to address New Delhi’s core concern. Former Indian Navy officer Kulbhushan Jadav continues to be on death row in Pakistan. Apart from some cosmetic action against Hafiz Saeed and Zaki ur Rahman Lakhvi of the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba to get out of the grey-list of the Financial Action Task Force, the anti-India terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan continues to be operational. Still, the Modi Government did not straightaway reject the overtures from Islamabad – obviously to deny Pakistan any chance to portray India before the new US administration as an inflexible and stubborn nation. Keen to avoid any regional instability disturbing its plan for early withdrawal of the US troops from Afghanistan, the Biden Administration was quick to laud the February 25 agreement between the armed forces of the two South Asian neighbours to stop cross-LoC firing.
New Delhi too took into account another factor when it refrained from outrightly dismissing the peace overtures from Islamabad – if the ceasefire along the LoC holds and keep the western border relatively calm, it will lessen, albeit to a limited extent, the pressure on the Indian Army, which has been engaged in a stand-off with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army along the disputed boundary between India and China in eastern Ladakh since April 2020.
The road towards real peace between India and Pakistan, however, remains long, potholed and prone to accidents. No one in New Delhi has any iota of doubt about that.