When Indians and Pakistanis meet at any level, the camaraderie is spontaneous, thanks to the heritage and traditional values we share. There was then no question that the informal summit between Prime Ministers Manmohan Singh and Yousaf Raza Gilani at Mohali on Wednesday would be imbued with warmth, past troubles notwithstanding. It is just as well that there were little expectations as such — that might have ruined things, for there are unanswered questions regarding 26/11 lying with Islamabad.
The invitation was spontaneous from the Indian side, and its acceptance gracious on Pakistan’s part. There was no pressure of outcomes: conversations at the top were loosely choreographed and spontaneous to the extent such events can be. But make no mistake. The Indian ruling establishment lent its weight to the PM’s initiative. Congress president Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul, the party’s rising star and probable future Prime Minister, were with the Pakistani leader on the cricket ground, as were several top Indian dignitaries. This is in stark contrast with the time two-and-a-half years ago when Dr Singh’s forward stance at Sharm el-Sheikh had gone half cock, with the Congress sinking in its cups.
This is the significant change that marks the Indian stand regarding Pakistan. Its meaning is that Dr Singh and the UPA-2 will give full backing to the civilian leadership in Islamabad. There is an implied recognition — which the Indians have been careful not to make explicit for fear of raising questions domestically — that Pakistan’s civilian government is, really speaking, powerless to decide whether to be of assistance to India on 26/11 or not. In the short term, New Delhi’s decision is, therefore, to sidestep that question as much as feasible, and move on to explore if cooperation is possible in other areas. Whether any of this impresses the Pakistani military leadership — the people who really count on the other side of the border — is a moot question. The hope in New Delhi is, however, that the people of Pakistan would be favourably inclined toward India’s new approach. This is not an unrealistic expectation, but a caveat should be entered. Civil society in Pakistan has been pushed back by the extremists who are running amuck in the public space, as the aftermath of the recent assassinations of Salman Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti showed. The Western friends of both India and Pakistan will, nevertheless, probably approve of the Mohali interlude. In Kashmir too, the Prime Minister’s initiative should go down well, though politicians there are known to be mealy-mouthed and prone to conceal what they wish to say.
In a sense, Dr Singh seems to be attempting a return to the phase before Kargil when Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee had sought to open up the people-level frontier, and the response from the Pakistani people was not lukewarm. The Indian group that Dr Singh invited to dinner with his Pakistani guest in Mohali included Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar, agriculture minister Sharad Pawar and Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia. This speaks of a certain outlook in pushing “cooperative solutions” at the popular level, to use Dr Singh’s own description. Not losing sight of reality, the Prime Minister, according to a briefing by foreign secretary Nirupama Rao, “reiterated the need for an atmosphere free of violence and terror in order to enable the true normalisation of relations between India and Pakistan”. This is the fly in the ointment. This is the factor that has upset the applecart before. If the Zardari-Gilani dispensation in Pakistan (or any other civilians) does not show the capacity to exert itself in this direction, the dreams can be interrupted by a rude awakening.