What did our MPs’ tour to US achieve?

Parliamentarians of diverse political affiliations came together on June 10 as Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosted a reception for seven multi-party delegations. They had just returned from a tour of 30 countries, from whom they had sought support for India’s battle against terrorism sponsored by Pakistan.

The prime minister was briefed by Shashi Tharoor, who had led the delegation to the United States, and others. Ironically, around the same time, in Washington DC, Gen Michael Erik Kurilla, commander of the United States Central Command, was showering praise on Pakistan, calling it a “phenomenal partner” of the US in, believe it or not, combating terrorism.

He particularly highlighted the Pakistan army’s role in hunting down ISIS-K terrorists, conveniently forgetting that Al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden had lived in the vicinity of the Pakistan Military Academy for almost a decade. In his testimony to a panel of the US Congress, he even suggested that the US could have counterterrorism partnerships with both India and Pakistan. 

President Donald Trump had also publicly lauded Pakistan for handing over an ISIS-K operative to the US a few months ago. After the April 22 carnage in Pahalgam intensified tensions between India and Pakistan, Trump’s administration had called for a “responsible solution” and advised the two nations to “work together”. None from Washington called out Pakistan for facilitating terror attacks against India.

Trump equated the sponsor and victim of terrorism when, on April 26, he said that he was very close to India and Pakistan, countries fighting “for a thousand years”. He claimed credit for the ‘ceasefire’ between the two countries on May 10, and went on to offer help to resolve the Kashmir dispute. New Delhi’s repeated rebuttals did not stop him from bragging about how he had pulled back the two neighbours from the brink of a “bad nuclear war” by threatening to stop trading with them.

Given the much-touted Modi-Trump ‘chemistry’, the re-hyphenation of India and Pakistan by the 47th US president is undoubtedly a diplomatic setback for New Delhi. The leadership has also failed to dissuade the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank from granting loans to Islamabad. The cautious and neutral statements from Washington after the April 22 terrorist attack in J&K and the Trump administration’s lack of interest in resisting China’s bid at the United Nations Security Council to water down a statement on the carnage were certainly not in sync with the February 13 consensus between Modi and Trump to eliminate terrorist safe havens from every corner of the world. As the prime minister attends a G7 outreach session in Canada on Tuesday, the message he should convey to the US, and to the rest of the West, is that the global fight against terrorism must not be weakened by a “my-terrorist-your-terrorist” divide.