THE terrorists who transformed two carriages of the Friendship Express between New Delhi and Lahore into an inferno on Sunday could not have received a sharper rebuke for their wickedness than the two new initiatives just announced by India and Pakistan. First of all, both sides have now demonstrated a new determination to get on with their talks in order to withdraw troops from the Siachen Glacier in disputed Kashmir. They have capped the process by unveiling a deal designed to keep one another informed about their respective nuclear weaponry. This is good news indeed and is a suitable response to the train depravity that claimed 68 lives. Suspicion as to those responsible for the bombing falls on Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is implacably opposed to Indo-Pakistani rapprochement.
The killers might have been hoping, as with last’s July’s Mumbai train bombings in which 182 passengers died, that this latest outrage would once again put cross-border talks on hold. They miscalculated. Both governments agree that this latest horror underlines the need for accelerated progress. The fact that many of the weekend’s victims were Pakistani has underlined how both countries are being challenged.
Pakistani authorities have offered to help the Indians in their investigations into the atrocity. Indians have declined. While that is in a way regrettable, it might have been a step too far in this delicate rebuilding of bridges. No doubt the Pakistani police and intelligence will, in any event, provide their Indian counterparts with any useful intelligence and answer any queries that are posed to them.
The important point is that the reconstruction of trust between these two nuclear powers is seen as paramount. The decision to press ahead immediately with fresh talks on the details of a mutual withdrawal from the world’s highest battlefield is encouraging. There are delicate issues. The Indian government, for instance, proposes marking the cease-fire line to show the rival positions and avoid the risk that any future encroachment on them would renew the conflict. For their part, the Pakistanis fear that any physical delineation of the old fighting lines would amount to the de facto recognition of a border. Such points are hard to iron out, precisely because of a lack of trust. The nuclear agreement, however, looks set to make a major contribution to reducing distrust. The deal signed yesterday is designed to reduce the risk of a nuclear arms accident. No details were immediately available of how the arrangement would work but the two sides already exchange lists of nuclear facilities at the start of every year.
What is clear at present is that the relations between the two countries are now beginning to move well beyond the stage of smiles and handshakes for the media to the discussion of substantive issues. After they had each signed the nuclear deal yesterday, both Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee and his Pakistani counterpart, Khurshid Kasuri, spoke of the likelihood of other agreements soon on cooperation in education, information, IT and telecom, health, agriculture, tourism and science.
No one ever pretended that reconciliation would be easy. If the politicians are beginning to place more trust in their opposite numbers, Indians and Pakistanis on the street — who all want peace — still need to be convinced that the time has finally come. For 60 years since independence and partition, there has been too much bloodshed, too much anger and too much distrust between the two countries for them to melt away quickly and effortlessly.
