By Sanjeev Miglani
Pakistan and the United States are in the middle of such a
public and bruising fight that Islamabad’s other pet hate, India, has receded
into the background. A Pakistani banker friend, only half in jest, said
his country had bigger fish to fry than to worry about India, now that it had
locked horns with the superpower.
But more seriously, India itself has kept a low profile,
resisting the temptation to twist the knife deeper into its neighbour when
it faces the risk of isolation. Much of what Pakistan stands accused
of, including the main charge of using violent extremism as an instrument
of foreign policy, is an echo of what New Delhi has been blaming Pakistan for,
for two decades now. Even the language that America’s military officials
led by Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Committee, and diplomats have employed such as “proxy wars” , “cross
border raids” or terrorism central to describe Pakistan is a
throwback to the 1990s and later when India and Pakistan were dueling over
Kashmir.
“What Mullen has said with regard to the role of
certain forces in Pakistan, is also something which is nothing new to us. In
fact when we were the first to flag this issue earlier, the world didn’t
believe us,” the Press Trust of India quoted Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh as
telling reporters on board his plane on the way home from the UN General
Assembly meeting in New York.
But the tone and tenor of the Indian response to Pakistan’s
predicament, including on the Hindu right, has been remarkably
restrained. This, as former Indian Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran wrote in
The Indian
Express on Thursday,
is hardly the time to gloat over Pakistan’s situation.
If anything, India and Pakistan this week agreed to overhaul trade ties that everyone recognizes
can strengthen the peace constituency in both countries as they develop stakes
in each other’s economies. Pakistan is moving towards granting India Most
Favoured Nation status – the very word used to be anathema to the
Pakistani right even if it doesn’t really mean a great deal — while India may
lift a veto on lifting all tariffs on Pakistan textile exports to Europe as a
step toward helping the neighbour climb out of a deep economic downturn.
Actually this might be a time for India to deepen engagement
with its neighbour in other areas too, Saran argues, saying
Pakistan’s western borders were so hot that it had a greater stake in
stabilising ties with India than before, even if it was purely tactical.
Pakistan’s “meddling” in Kashmir, where cross-border violence is already down
to its lowest level, may become even less, he says. Given the
heat over the security establishment’s links to the Haqqani network, it may
even tell other militant groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba, blamed for the
2008 Mumbai attacks, to further lower their profile.
For India, it creates an opportunity to test Pakistan’s
willingness to enter into negotiations on some of the less contentious issues
such as a military standoff on the remote Siachen glacier and a dispute over
Sir Creek in the Arabian Sea. In New York this week, Pakistani Foreign Minister
Hin Rabbani Khar offered uninterrupted dialogue with India.
But the worry lines remain on Afghanistan where the
assassination of former president Burhanuddin Rabbani has robbed India of
a leader of the old Northern Alliance, which New Delhi supported
during the civil war. It could be well be the start of a campaign by
Taliban militants and their supporters in Pakistan to finish off Afghan
leaders seen to be well disposed to India, B.Raman, the
former head of India’s Research and Analysis Wing, wrote on his blog. As
Western forces thin out, the battle for influence will only intensify.
India, which went on a diplomatic overdrive following the
ouster of the Taliban and the installation of the India-friendly
Hamid Karzai administration, pouring millions of dollars in aid, faces its
toughest challenges yet if the United States sticks to its plan to
withdraw forces. One option is to revive the Northern Alliance that fought
the Taliban, but quite apart from the fact that members of the alliance
have gone into government or splintered away, it is no longer certain that the
old regional players such as Russia and Iran would line up behind. Raman
said it was doubtful that India could strike the same level of
cooperation with Russia as in the past, while an alliance with Iran, the other
backer was virtually ruled out because of America’s hostility.
Source : Reuters
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