S Jaishankar brings hope for India-Pak ties as External Affairs Minister

S Jaishankar is a technocrat who is unlikely to use statements like 'ghar me ghus ke maroonga' as defining elements of Indian policy towards Pakistan

Last month, India’s Ambassador to the US Harsh Shringla said in Washington after Narendra Modi was re-elected prime minister that India will not hold talks with Pakistan until it gives up its state policy of supporting terrorism. That basically means India will never talk to Pakistan. So what will happen in Bishkek later this week when Modi, empowered anew by his stupendous Lok Sabha election victory, meets his Pakistani counterpart Imran Khan at the summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO)?

More of nothing?

A major change has occurred between Ambassador Shringla’s observation and now. S Jaishankar has become minister for external affairs (EAM). It is not known whether Jaishankar is a paid-up member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) yet: Obviously, he will have to become one when he seeks election as an MP from either House of Parliament within the next six months. But that is a secondary issue. He is now, even without being an MP, India’s EAM, and not a nominal one either. He will rule and reign, unlike Sushma Swaraj, who was known in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) privately as Mother India. India hasn’t really seen a proactive EAM for five years and more. In his 2014-19 tenure, Modi was his own EAM with crucial inputs from National Security Advisor (NSA) A K Doval. This is the only period in recent history that saw an Indian government not engaging Pakistan in any structured dialogue in all its five years in office. All kinds of conditionalities were introduced, including some patently bogus ones — like Pakistan interlocutors not meeting Hurriyat — to put off talks. The last recorded official conversation with Pakistan was in mid-2012 as the engagement process was derailed by the beheading of an Indian soldier on the LoC in January 2013. Till then, three rounds of talks had been held under the new resumed dialogue started in 2011 following the India-Pakistan summit at Sharm al-Sheikh in 2009. The power of public opinion became the new deterrent: With every new atrocity on the LoC, there was one more reason to disrupt talks under the UPA regime. In the NDA regime, this did not change materially.

Aren’t things a bit different now?

A man who has spent all his life as a diplomat defining national interest is now the EAM. True, the success of India’s foreign policy does not rest on the touchstone of whether one or another regime restores equable — ‘cordial’ may be a bridge too far — ties with Pakistan. But a great deal of national anxiety is invested in India–Pakistan relations.  If you look at it, the victory over Pakistan and an attack on its capacity to enable infiltration into India was the single most important theme in the elections just gone by. But interestingly, the man to whom Modi has entrusted the Pakistan ball, secured after a hard-fought politico-military battle, is not a rah-rah ABVP-VHP-Bajrang Dal type. He is a technocrat who is unlikely to use statements like ‘ghar me ghus ke maroonga’ as defining elements of Indian policy towards Pakistan.

Pakistan is in parlous straits. At the recent meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC), Khan tried to raise Kashmir as an issue of the brotherhood of the OIC but got an extremely tepid response. The OIC had bigger fish to fry and problems to address. Internally, all opposition parties have announced their intention of starting a countrywide movement against the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) government in the next few weeks. The leadership of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) believes that the government has been trying to isolate the opposition parties by using various state institutions, including the National Accountability Bureau (NAB). The country’s worst-kept secret is its economic crisis — made worse by the fact that there is no consensus on how it should be fixed (Asad Umar, Khan’s right-hand man whom he appointed finance minister, opted to resign rather than endorse an IMF loan).

Is this the time to initiate a thaw in relations? And how will Jaishankar weigh in? The SCO meeting in Bishkek will have some clues.