By Tarun Basu, IANS,
New Delhi: India does not have much expectation from the foreign secretary-level talks with Pakistan. But when circumstances are rapidly changing in the region and the situation remains highly unpredictable, it was considered better to keep the civilian establishment in Islamabad engaged in talks rather than create a diplomatic vacuum to let non-state actors run their writ over the bilateral disengagement.
According to knowledgeable sources close to high-level government thinking, the future of the dialogue will depend very much on the the attitude and response of Pakistan to the terrorist activities emanating from its soil. If Pakistan shows continued unwillingness to act against the “terror masterminds” – as it has been pussyfooting all this while – New Delhi does not see much future in continuing the dialogue.
“India is not looking three months ahead; a lot depends on what Pakistan brings to the table. If they are here just to grandstand, then the talks have no future,” a source familiar with the thinking in highest policy-making circles said bluntly.
But what is clear from conversations is that the talks are certainly not an outcome of American pressure. In fact, recent American interlocutors in New Delhi, US special envoy Richard Holbrooke and Defense Secretary Robert Gates among others, have privately supported the Indian stand so far of the utter futility of talking to Islamabad in the absence of a clear decision maker there.
Gates even went so far as to say that New Delhi was well within its right to retaliate at cross-border provocations and had commended its restraint all this while.
According to knowledgeable diplomatic sources who were also at the recent London conference on Afghanistan, the Pakistan Army somehow feels vindicated about its strategic positioning as a key Western ally against the “forces of terror” in what is known as the Af-Pak region and could have become emboldened to make aggressive moves on India.
So sections in the Indian establishment, from what one can make out, are ready to gamble on the talks as “not talking is not helping and instinctive reactions would only amount to playing into Islamabad’s trap about the India threat”.
Pakistan has been telling the US that the “constant Indian threat of retaliation” was forcing it to retain mobilisation on its eastern border and precluding it from shifting more troops to the western frontier with Afghanistan and take on the cross-border Taliban militias.
Pakistan watchers also say that Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has clearly a larger gameplan in Islamabad’s shifting powerplay. With his three-year term as army chief ending in November, it is conceivable that he might be harbouring political ambitions and the fresh corruption cases mounted against President Asif Ali Zardari by ex-ISI officers seem a possible pointer in that direction. Kayani is the former director general of the country’s all-powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
While critics of the talks, like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have said the talks were done under American pressure and have reservations about its outcome when Islamabad does not seem to have made much progress in bringing those behind 26/11 to book, pro-establishment sources admit candidly that talking was no insurance against more attacks.
But, in a fragmented polity like Pakistan where the core establshment was anti-Indian, the feeling from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s strategic advisers was that not talking won’t help either.
And Manmohan Singh did not wish to go down in history as someone who did not take a shot at peace.
That Islamabad took two full weeks to respond to New Delhi’s surprising offer for talks shows the clear confusion and division of views in the Pakistani establishment regarding its stance towards India, though it is quite apparent here that for the moment it is Kayani who is calling the shots.