dailyO
Politics

Why India-Pakistan can't be friends

Advertisement
Kanwal Sibal
Kanwal SibalSep 26, 2017 | 10:33

Why India-Pakistan can't be friends

Pakistan has excelled itself this year in its compulsive propaganda blast against India at the annual UNGA sessions. Just as its friendship with China is all-weather, its hostility towards India is decidedly all-season. In the last 70 years the international landscape has got transformed, countries — including Pakistan — have broken up, the enemies of yesterday have become friends of today, nations have adjusted their policies to changed conditions, but Pakistan’s animus towards India has not subsided.

Advertisement

Strife

Rather than exploring ways of making peace it has focused on newer ways to continue the strife with India. To religious antagonism, it has added to its arsenal nuclear capability and then terrorism. Even when its quest to wrest Kashmir or damage India internally has failed, its determination to pursue its confrontation with India, no matter what the cost to its own well-being, has not flagged.

Through the US decision to designate Hizbul Mujahideen (HuM) chief Syed Salahuddin as an international terrorist and later the HuM itself as a terrorist organisation — an act that has delegitimised the supposed “Kashmiri struggle for independence” — the message to Pakistan on its duplicitous conduct on terrorism has become clearer. (The BRICS declaration naming Pakistan-based terrorist organisations like LeT and JeM would have shaken Pakistan too.)

More importantly, after President Donald Trump’s Afghanistan speech that summoned Pakistan to immediately cease providing safe havens to “agents of chaos” under threat of unstated US retribution, an unnerved Pakistan seems to have concluded that offence being the better part of defence, it should go all out to agitate the Kashmir issue vociferously on the international stage.

Advertisement

This would be a show of defiance towards the US as well as India, besides being consistent with Pakistan’s well worn tactics of creating an atmosphere of growing tensions with India so that the West feels concerned about the possibility of worsening India-Pakistan ties triggering a nuclear conflict.

Predictably, Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi has used the US think tank forums to brandish a nuclear threat against India by citing Pakistan’s possession of short-range nuclear weapons. He avoided making this threat from the UN podium as this would have been counterproductive in view of international concerns about the nuclear dimensions of the ongoing North Korean crisis.

Abbasi’s lurid rant on Kashmir should be seen in this background. In it he referred to the 7,00,000 Indian troops in Kashmir as constituting “the most intense foreign military occupation in recent history”, characterised the use of force in Kashmir as “war crimes”, demanded that the UN Secretary General and the High Commissioner for Human Rights send an enquiry commission to Kashmir to investigate human rights violations by India and accused India of “using rape as an instrument of state policy”.

indo-pak1-copy_092617095822.jpg

Terrorism

He also called on the UN Secretary General to appoint a special envoy on Kashmir for implementing the defunct UN resolutions on J&K. Finally, he accused India of state-sponsored terrorism against Pakistan, including from across its western border. This sweeping attack on India elicited an equally no holds barred response from a junior Indian diplomatic officer, followed by a scathing attack by Sushma Swaraj.

Advertisement

Even by Pakistani standards, Abbasi’s diplomatic assault on India at the UN went too far. Pakistan’s attitudes have become so rogue in nature that it has lost the capacity for self-restraint, of recognising its own vulnerabilities, of being able to judge properly whether the positions it takes have credibility in the eyes of others, much less support. (China’s subsequent statement that Kashmir is an issue left over by history and should be resolved bilaterally between India and Pakistan should not have been lost on Pakistan.)

Rogue

It is not surprising that, speaking at the UN, Pakistan’s envoy Maleeha Lodhi should have passed off the photograph of a Palestinian girl with her face pock marked by shrapnel from an Israeli bomb in 2014 as that of a Kashmiri girl suffering from pellet gun injuries. Clearly, her colleagues, sharing the same degree of bile against India as hers, wanted to choose the most dramatic picture to make a point about the face of Indian democracy and tripped.

Just as North Korea, by acquiring nuclear and missile capability, has carved out space for itself for defying international norms with a sense of impunity, Pakistan too — but much earlier — has created space for its rogue conduct on terrorism and nuclear issues by acquiring nuclear and missile muscle.

The other aspect of Abbasi’s raw diplomacy at New York was his remarkable statement at a think tank that India had a zero political and military role in Afghanistan. That Pakistan claims the right to control Afghanistan’s foreign relations shows how blighted has Pakistan’s thinking become.

Abbasi is a transitional figure, a Nawaz Sharif loyalist, put in place by the latter until the elections in 2018. With Sharif under duress, the military is in fuller control of Pakistan’s India policy, and Abbasi has followed the script given to him. From all this, the inevitable conclusion flows: that India-Pakistan relations will remain frozen for the foreseeable future.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)

Last updated: September 26, 2017 | 14:56
IN THIS STORY
Please log in
I agree with DailyO's privacy policy