India-Pakistan parleys inevitably generate public interest, media hype and raised expectations, often followed by predictable denouement. Since 1991, dialogue has been repeatedly revived, nurtured and then interrupted, undermined by terrorism, the trail often leading to Pakistan.

The July 26-28 visit of the newly minted Pakistan foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, despite the July 13 triple bombings in Mumbai was hope triumphing over experience. She dominated the visual media with her expensive bags, pearls and Pakistani
designer suits and her clear articulation of her country’s interests. External affairs minister S.M. Krishna, known to excel only at sharp dressing, stood outmatched.
The bonhomie faltered momentarily when Ms Khar met Hurriyat leaders a day before her official appointments. The Union government, complicit in the drama, was rattled by the publicity blitz enabling Ms Khar to play to the home gallery besides handing the self-appointed spokesmen of the Kashmiris a propaganda platform. Normally such meetings have been held after the official engagements.
The primary purpose of Ms Khar’s visit was to restore harmony, ruptured during Mr Krishna’s 2010 Islamabad visit with a live airing of differences with his Pakistani counterpart, Shah Mehmood Qureshi. The two eschewed further contact except on brush on the United Nations porch, until Mr Qureshi’s ouster over the Davis affair.
The Delhi encounter had been carefully choreographed by the foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan by first meeting in Islamabad last month, followed by another meeting before Ms Khar’s arrival.
The public narrative was closely coordinated and media questioning evaded. If former foreign secretary Nirupama Rao in Islamabad narrated “lessons of history”, Ms Khar warned against being “hostage of the past”. If Ms Rao’s visit, coinciding with elections in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, indirectly helped the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Ms Khar’s sojourn burnishes Congress’ pro-Muslim credentials before Uttar Pradesh elections, critical to Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi’s ascendancy to prime ministership.
Was the visit unfolding a fresh chapter in India-Pakistan relations or redressing old issues in fresh formats? The government’s consistent view is that for peace and stability in South Asia, dialogue with Pakistan is mandatory.
The Mumbai train bombings of 2006, and then the 26/11 monstrosity of 2008 tested this thesis. The immensity of loss of life in both and the audacity of the 26/11 attacks halted the talks even though, as Pervez Musharraf keeps parroting, a back-channel Kashmir solution, by making borders irrelevant, was almost ready. This proposal was first mooted by US ambassador J.K. Galbraith in the 1960s.
Post 26/11, the government, including the Prime Minster, repeatedly sought the dismantling of Pakistan’s India-specific terror network as a pre-condition to resuming dialogue.
At Sharm el-Sheikh clever drafting was attempted to delink the two. Public outrage killed that on arrival. Now the ploy is to simply rename the composite dialogue, freeing the nine-odd subjects, as they were since Rajiv Gandhi’s 1989 Islamabad visit till they were clubbed together in 1998 under the nomenclature “composite”. Simultaneity was on Pakistani insistence as they feared that confidence-building measures on trade and people-to-people contact would reduce their leverage for a resolution of the Kashmir issue.
Ms Khar’s television interviews seemed to endorse the old Indian argument for incremental movement, leaving complex issues for later. Even President Zardari had initially voiced similar sentiments, though later choosing silence.
Where does the Pakistani military stand on this? Their thinking may be getting conditioned by their contemporary security dilemmas. First is a serious downturn in US-Pakistan relations, commencing with the Davis affair, then the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) burning of two Central Intelligence Agency station chiefs in Pakistan, the place and manner of Osama bin Laden’s killing, the suspension of $800 million in US military assistance, and now action against Ghulam Nabi Fai, director of Kashmir Centre, Washington. The Army’s reputation hit a further low when militants breached the Mehran base and then a journalist died in ISI custody. Secondly, they are focused on the Afghanistan endgame. Thirdly, they are assessing the fluid domestic political situation with a restive judiciary and impatient Sharif brothers planning to oust the PPP government in Islamabad.
Unleashing the young Ms Khar on a gullible India buys the Pakistani Army breathing space, lulls India into complacency and inaction in Afghanistan, and demonstrates to the US that the civilian government is getting a grip on the rogue elements in the security agencies.
Meanwhile, terrorist acts in India would be outsourced to local modules for low-tech hits that keep the Indian security agencies confused and the Indian polity divided between the extreme right’s minority phobia and Digvijay Singh’s compulsive contrarianism.
For diluting its stand on terror (referring in the joint statement to merely the Mumbai trial and not follow-up on Headley confessions) India obtained a few more cross-Line of Control confidence-building measures, but denied a Kargil-Skardu bus service, the moral equivalence for Pakistan as a terror victim and reversible promises on trade, people-to-people contact and new confidence-building measures in nuclear and conventional areas (where Pakistan has always sought parity through a strategic restraint regime, ignoring India’s China concern). Ms Khar could have pronounced like Julius Caesar: veni, vidi, vici (I came, I saw, I conquered), except that besting the willingly submissive is hardly conquest.

K.C. Singh is a former secretary in the external affairs ministry