The India-Pakistan wind’s changing

HAS the time come for Prime Minister Modi to drop his inhibitions and say, “Yes, I Will”, to Pakistan?

For the uninitiated, much has happened in the last 48 hours. In Punjab, as the Aam Aadmi Party consolidates itself in the face of a shrinking Shiromani Akali Dal — whose MLAs, significantly, are not joining their former partners, the BJP — Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, whose family hails from Amritsar, has written to Modi, inviting him to attend a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Islamabad in October.

An honest and face-to-face conversation with your enemy is real catharsis.

The Ministry of External Affairs has confirmed that it has received such an invite, but not what it intends to do about it. It is also true that the Pakistani establishment may have put out this news in the hope that it builds some public pressure inside India — bleeding-heart liberals, who for their livelihood depend on reaching out and touching someone, as well as the candle-lighting brigade at Attari-Wagah can always be depended upon to push the envelope in favour of talks.

Equally true is the boring predictability of the naysayers. Modi cannot, must not, should not go to Islamabad because Pakistan is the enemy and cannot be trusted. In case you belong to this ilk, then, you should quickly pack your bags and take the next bus to Gurdaspur, so that you have a chance to reaffirm your animosity.

Here, where the drones fall within spitting distance of the Zero Line, that is a few km inside of the India-Pakistan border, you know that the purest-grade white heroin load — in local parlance, chitta — that the hexacopters carry, has been packed and placed on the orders of the Pakistani establishment. There are many ways to carry out a ‘proxy war’, of course.

Another way is to infiltrate trained terrorists into the Jammu region. Military analysts believe that the ambushes of Indian soldiers and paramilitary in recent months — as many as 18 soldiers have been killed so far this summer — is a well-considered strategy by the Pakistani state to shift the focus away from the Kashmir valley.

So, what should PM Modi do? Should he go to Pakistan or not?

Remember that 10 long years ago, Modi had invited Nawaz Sharif, then Prime Minister of Pakistan, to his swearing-in ceremony in Delhi and Sharif had turned up — against the advice of his own powerful military establishment. When Sharif returned home from Delhi, it was said that he and his job were in trouble, because he had chosen to shake the hand of the man who was the Chief Minister of Gujarat when the 2002 riots had taken place, in which more than a thousand Muslims had been killed. The way Sharif explained it — Modi was the PM of South Asia’s most powerful country, Pakistan was India’s neighbour and both had been through the rough-and-tumble of history — it was his duty to offer the hand of peace.

The peace pipe didn’t last long. On January 2, 2016, Pakistani terrorists attacked the Pathankot airbase. Soon, Modi had announced that he was breaking off all conversation with Pakistan until cross-border terrorism came to an end. The deep freeze was turned on.

But the truth is that eight years on, cross-border terrorism has not come to an end. The Jammu terror incidents from this summer indicate that someone continues to orchestrate the whole show from behind the scenes. “Uski tooti mere haath main hai” (I hold the lever in my hands) — that is how in the summer of 1999, at the height of the Kargil War, a senior Pakistan General described Pakistan’s control of cross-border terrorism to then army chief Gen Pervez Musharraf. The conversations were recorded by Indian intelligence, transcribed and shown to then Pakistan Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz when he stopped over in Delhi en route to Beijing.

Aziz had been trying to defend the indefensible, that is, the Pakistani invasion at Kargil, when he was confronted with the tapes. He had nothing more to say after that.

Modi has been confronted with the same dilemma since 2016. He fully understands that the nature of the Pakistani state hasn’t changed and what’s more, is unlikely to change in the near future. If he had any doubts, the carefully instigated overthrow of Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh next door — no doubt, she is fully responsible for allowing the situation to reach this crescendo — should give him a clearer picture of India’s dangerous neighbourhood.

So, should he continue with upping the ante — ‘surgical strikes’ in 2016, followed by missile strikes in Balakote in 2019 — even though it’s clear that Pakistan will find new ways to hurt India every day? Or should he take a leaf out of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s book and try to make peace with the nation that the latter went to war with?

It’s clear that the wind is shifting in the India-Pakistan corner again. Modi remains a strong third-term Prime Minister, but he has had to go the extra mile to woo both Russia and the US over Ukraine. It’s not clear whether the Big Powers want Modi to renew contact with Pakistan again, which is what explains the timing of the Islamabad invite. Even if the invite is for a pro-China organisation, which is what the SCO is, perhaps the Americans are testing the waters. They certainly don’t want Pakistan to be fully drawn into China’s sway.

And then there’s Kashmir. More than one India-Pakistan-US Track Two conversation has come away with the revelation that Pakistan may be willing to tone down its very harsh criticism of the abrogation of Article 370 and return to a conversation if India conducts elections in Jammu & Kashmir. Guess what’s happening there in September.

The fact remains that Modi should make the decision to go or not to go to Islamabad on his own merit — and how it will play at home. (For one, it is bound to burnish his credentials with the influential candle-lighting constituency at Attari-Wagah.) Second, Modi knows that secure leaders and nations are not afraid to speak to anyone, especially their enemies. Third, key state elections are around the corner. If Haryana and Maharashtra are lost to the Opposition, the sense of the BJP and PM Modi being further pushed into a political corner will increase.

Apart from the fact that an honest and face-to-face conversation with your enemy is real catharsis, imagine the boost to his popularity if Modi goes to Pakistan.