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National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon has left for the US to prepare for talks between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Barack Obama, even as reports are that the PM’s special envoy Satinder Lambah remains in back-channel talks with Pakistan’s special envoy Shahryar Khan to return the India-Pakistan relationship to a modicum of restraint and common sense.
It seems now that Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif will definitely meet in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, with the Congress party coming to the late realisation that it cannot let the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) run its foreign policy agenda while remaining in the Opposition.
However, all bets are off on the composite dialogue that should have started with meetings on the Wular Barrage and Sir Creek, even as India was set to propose talks between the home secretaries and defence secretaries.
None of these meetings are likely now. Even the Singh-Sharif meeting could be reduced to a mere handshake, as the BJP is now demanding and the Congress party, already nervous about its failing poll prospects, may likely to agree with.
That would, indeed, be a lost opportunity for India. External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid has said, in a variety of television interviews, India is looking forward to engaging with Sharif.
It is also hugely ironical that the BJP won’t let the Congress speak to Sharif, a man that a former BJP leader and prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, was determined to break bread with in 1999. All BJP leaders can remember today is how Vajpayee broke up the Agra talks with Pervez Musharraf in 2001 – they seem almost embarrassed about the fact that Vajpayee invited him to India in the first place -- when he saw Musharraf preening himself before the TV cameras.
Meanwhile, in an interview on Pakistan television over the weekend, Pakistan’s special advisor on foreign affairs Sartaz Aziz has said Sharif has written as many as seven letters to Singh, exhorting him to let the peace process continue.
Aziz has also said Pakistan foreign secretary Jalil Jilani has spoken to India’s foreign secretary Sujatha Singh, and proposed the upgrade of the weekly military conversation between the two director-generals of military operations to a civil-military conversation, in which the two foreign offices will be involved.
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So far, though, there has been no response from India’s side.
Indeed, India’s extreme shyness in responding to Pakistan’s appeal to continue talking to each other boggles the mind. Singh, whose commitment to peace with Pakistan has been the backbone of the Congress party’s Pakistan policy, is now looking so weak and abandoned that he seems to have bought into the hardline school of thought in the party that it cannot seem “weak” when talking to Pakistan.
According to this line, if Indira Gandhi, the woman who broke up Pakistan, were alive, she would not only have stopped talks with Pakistan, she would have gone a couple of steps ahead.
Pity that the Congress, while it analyses the returns from its neighbourhood foreign policy, doesn’t see that by caving into the BJP, it is only allowing the defence and security establishment to instinctively turn towards the BJP. If foreign policy has finally become a poll issue, why vote for the B-team anyway?
Turns out that before the August 6 incidents on the border in which five soldiers were killed, the India-Pakistan establishments were considering a step-by-step revival of the political and bureaucratic peace process which would culminate in a visit by Singh to Pakistan in December.
The PM had indicated to Shahryar Khan during his visit to Delhi in July that time was of the essence, and that both countries should not waste any time in delaying the meetings that needed to take place before he could think of undertaking that Pakistan visit.
It is also believed both sides had agreed that the back-channel talks between Lambah and Khan would take up substantive issues, like Kashmir and Siachen and how to stop terrorism, while the front-channel conversations between diplomats discussed movement on loosening up the visa regime, improving trade, etc.
As both channels arrived at their respective conclusions, a summit-level meeting between the two leaders in Islamabad would put the bilateral peace process back on track, in which Sharif would also announce movement against those accused in the Mumbai 2008 attacks.
Can such a visit to Pakistan still take place?
Question is, if Singh can still stand up and defend his peace moves towards its western neighbour? The answer to the second will give us the answer to the first question. With channels for bilateral exchanges narrowing rapidly, it is increasingly dependent on Singh and Sharif to make some real and substantive movement towards peace during their meeting in New York.
But since the BJP has already stated it is against such a “real and substantive” meeting, but will allow a handshake to take place, it is up to the two prime ministers to think out of the box and deliver some real results to their peoples.
Can Sharif announce in New York that he is ready to give the most favoured nation status to India, as a culmination of exchanges over the last couple of years between the trade bodies of the two countries as well as track two political exchanges? Can India unblock movement on the visa regime, to which it agreed last September, and which it shut down in angry response to the beheading on the Line of Control in January?
With 10 months left for general elections, Singh should use his meeting with Sharif to restore the nerve he seems to have lost in the neighbourhood. Sri Lanka’s foreign minister Gamini Peiris, as well as Bangladesh’s powerful textile minister Abdul Latif Siddique are in town this week – Sri Lanka is finally going ahead with its provincial elections to the Northern Province while Bangladesh’s general elections are slated for January – and both leaders are looking at India for support.
Can India, the largest country in South Asia, deliver?
