The two-day dialogue of the foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan, which ended in Islamabad on Friday, maintains the steady state which was sought to be brought into being by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Thimphu initiative about a year ago. The specific mandate provided by the Prime Minister was to reduce and eliminate the “trust deficit” that has marked relations between the two countries.
This objective appears to have been amply met at the foreign secretaries’ dialogue, given the tenor of the talks. India on this occasion agreed to a Kashmir-specific dialogue session, a development that would have pleased the Pakistan side enormously, and may be seen to be the principal reason that Pakistan has had no difficulty characterising the just-ended conversation as “cordial”, if “candid”. These expressions, agreed to by both sides to describe the engagement, suggest that both covered the thorny ground in detail at the official level but preferred not to let acrimony mar the occasion. Over the years India has never shied away from discussing the ‘K’ word with Pakistan, but it has preferred to bring to the table the question of terrorism along with it as violent extremist actions have been at the centre of destroying peace in Kashmir and jolting India-Pakistan ties.
Abandoning this route did not throw up new ideas. The two senior officials indicated this when they told the media that the engagement on the Kashmir question was to continue. At this stage, it cannot be said that the Pervez Musharraf-era formula of finding a solution without disturbing the territorial status quo would remain on the table. Dr Singh had famously said then that the idea was to make borders “irrelevant”. However, the so-called Musharraf formula has not found favour with the present Pakistan government, and Pakistan Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani has said so recently. Nevertheless, the two foreign secretaries agreed to step up the pace on cross-LoC confidence-building measures. The working group designated for this will convene shortly, before the meeting of the two foreign ministers in New Delhi next month. For now this means a less tight visa regime, opening up more trade points and days of trade between Kashmiri traders on the two sides of the divide, and possibly looking at bank facilities to eliminate barter, which is currently the mode of trade across the two Kashmirs. These are undoubtedly a positive outcome of the talks and should help provide relief to the people of Kashmir who are, in effect, divided by a historically violent boundary (the Line of Control).
Besides giving Pakistan greater room on Kashmir through exclusive focus on it, the Indian side clearly did not seize upon the recent David Headley disclosures at the Tahawwur Rana trial in Chicago to make its case more acutely in the matter of the punishment of those guilty of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. Of course, at the joint press conference of foreign secretary Nirupama Rao and her Pakistani counterpart Salman Bashir, the senior Indian official did not fail to point out that 26/11 was “of critical importance to us”. She noted that bringing the issue to a “satisfactory closure” would help the process of “normalisation” of relations, but gone was the earlier public insistence on trial and punishment of the guilty without delay. Mr Bashir, for his part, observed that while Pakistan noted India’s concerns, it preferred to treat the issue in a more “generic” sense — as an instance of terrorism which, of course, needed to be eliminated. Speaking at the joint press conference, he had little hesitation clubbing the Mumbai outrage with other high-profile incidents of terrorism. When the current India-Pakistan “process” moves to the level of foreign ministers in July, the spirit of the present is likely to be sustained.