#dnaEdit: No real takeaways

Regardless of the venue, there is always needless flutter and unrealistic build-up over meetings between the Prime Ministers of India and Pakistan. It was, therefore, inevitable that much would be read into Friday’s meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Pakistan counterpart Nawaz Sharif on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) at Ufa, in Russia. Modi has accepted Sharif’s invitation to attend the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in Pakistan next year. This was a mere formality, but then every gesture of friendliness — however small — is amplified because of the usually frayed relations between the two countries. 

One of the important outcomes of the talks is that the national security advisers of India and Pakistan, Ajit Doval and Sartaj Aziz, will meet in New Delhi and discuss the various aspects of terrorism. The date of this meeting is yet to be decided. Significantly, after a gap of many years, the foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan issued a joint statement after the talks. India has chosen to underline that there was no mention of the problem of Kashmir this time round in the joint Indo-Pak press statement. This is seen as some sort of a diplomatic victory, though it is doubtful as to how useful or substantial the supposed symbolic victory really is. The joint statement also announced the decision to speed up the trial of the November 26, 2008 Mumbai terror attack which is currently taking place in Pakistan. While India views this as a reiteration by Pakistan to bring the accused in the Mumbai terror attack case to book, Pakistan holds that India has the responsibility to provide the clinching evidence that is needed to book the perpetrators, including Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, who is the main accused. 

The positive, if vacuous, part of the joint statement talked about encouraging religious tourism, which is quite brisk even now with Sikhs travelling to Pakistan to visit Guru Nanak’s birthplace, and Muslims from Pakistan travelling to the dargah of the Moinuddin Chishti, the Sufi mystic, in Ajmer.

It is necessary to take a sober and mature view of the meetings between the Prime Ministers of India and Pakistan. It would be unrealistic to expect dramatic breakthroughs in Indo-Pak talks  only because of the personal interaction between the leaders of the two countries. It would be hard to deny that personal factors do play an important role in diplomacy, but the leaders cannot throw political constraints to the winds, and act out of sheer personal desire to improve ties between the two sides. Prime Ministers of India and Pakistan can take initiatives, even bold ones, but they cannot completely ignore the advice of the hardliners on both sides. No Pakistani leader can afford to be seen to compromise with his Indian counterpart, and the Indian Prime Minister, too, cannot break the mould. It is naïve to believe that if the two Prime Ministers display enough goodwill, relations between the two countries would be different and better.

There is, however, diplomatic compulsion for India and Pakistan to keep the communication channels open at all levels — from the prime minister’s office to that of the military commanders on the Line of Control (LoC). It is expected that ruling establishments in India and Pakistan will have many more hurdles to surmount before relations can be normalised at the top levels of power. It is, therefore, only practical that expectations are not raised too high each time the Prime Ministers from the two sides meet, shake hands, or exchange views.