It would have been a lot more impressive and meaningful if Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had made his intent to visit Pakistan more time-bound than open-ended. Who has seen 2016 and when you just kind of make these announcements from the odd summit, you are not narrating your foreign policy goals from the mountain top. It is more political chaff and of very little consequence.
This is not the first time he and Pakistan’s Premier Nawaz Sharif have met against the background of cordite and loss on the borders. Barely 24 hours prior to the meeting an Indian soldier was killed by gunfire from across the border.
These incursions occur far too frequently and the tension has never really de-escalated between the day Benazir Bhutto went book shopping in Shimla in 1972 and today. Subsequent governments on both sides have lethally managed to brainwash their citizens into an enmity that defies logic but continues to ensure that the incumbent gets some oxygen for his or her lease of life. To be pro, the other side is promptly seen as weakness and jeopardizes the party in power. Ergo, we are left to deal with the hubris of arrant stupidity, which masquerades as political expediency at best.
At present the conflict is not over land or territory and although the J&K impasse will never be taken off the table by Islamabad, Modi's current concern is terrorism in its many non-wondrous forms.
India’s accusations that extremism is a commodity that is dispatched as an unwanted export are met by stoic resistance, but there is enough evidence that anti-Indian groups do find refuge in that country.
Seeing as how this prickly pear has finally been placed on the agenda, it seems utterly pointless to keep it on the back burner till some time next year. Why this ball couldn't have been set rolling now and with urgency is inexplicable. Removing suspicion on both sides of each other's 'incursions' will certainly lead to a healthier relationship and more possibility of a real peace instead of the plastic freeze we witness these past few years.
Every high-level meeting is flat-lined and nothing comes off it. When Modi became PM, he went to J&K and made some very telling statements intended to send a strong message to his neighbor.
Modi did not throw the gauntlet from New Delhi. He flung it strategically from Kashmir, the issue that has been the sharpest thorn between the two countries. And he did it with intent. Exactly what that intent will be is still up for grabs and open to interpretation. He hoped to place Islamabad on the back foot and put the nexus on record.
Now that India and Pakistan can make each other's rubble dance perhaps it is time for a return to conventional sanity.
Having ensured that this is one act that can only be upped by a complete annihilation this is the ideal opportunity for statesmanship to come to the fore. Most likely, it will not, and both nations will continue to hurtle up the non-nuclear arms race spiral. The subcontinent is in jeopardy and there is misplaced celebration spawned in that absurd crucible of foreign policy where India and Pakistan are blind to everything beyond their political and military equations.
If there was a genuine seriousness to the need for a deep down and dirty discussion it should have been immediate, not consigned to some distant schedule.
