Ms Khar’s journey to India

Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar’s short visit to India was not without embarrassing moments. At the dinner hosted for her by the Pakistani high commissioner, Ram Jethmalani, a BJP member of the Rajya Sabha who is a former Indian law minister, decided to make an impromptu speech. Turning to Foreign Minister Khar, he said, “I wanted to be invited today after I saw your pictures in the newspapers.” And then, in the presence of the Chinese ambassador, he blurted out: “Do not accept China as your friend, China is an enemy of both India and Pakistan. Beware of the Chinese.”

High Commissioner Shahid Malik retorted that Pakistan did not subscribe to these views while Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao and the Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Rajiv Shukla rushed over to the Chinese envoy to apologise. The ambassador could have walked out of the dinner but refrained from doing so out of respect for Pakistan. An eminent Indian intellectual and constitutional lawyer phoned me from Mumbai and said, “Your high commissioner has been here long enough and should have known better. Jethmalani is extremely controversial and often behaves like a bull in a china shop. He should never have been invited.”

Former foreign secretary Riaz Khokhar, whose knowledge of India is encyclopaedic, expressed similar views. He said that the octogenarian Jethmalani, one of India’s highest-paid lawyers, has the reputation of being partial to the bottle and was probably speaking under the influence of Bacchus (the Greek god of wine). One can only hope that the Pakistani High Commission is chastened by this experience and will in future refrain from extending invitations to eccentrics with bacchanalian proclivities.

Foreign Minister Khar acquitted herself reasonably well. Admittedly, there were no spectacular achievements, but a diplomat can only be as ingenious as his or her brief and the rest depends on articulation which, in the words of a former Pakistani foreign minister, is “the hallmark of diplomacy.” Ms Khar said what she was required to say with precision and clarity, but at times seemed to forget that diplomacy is all about euphemisms and skilful nuances.

For instance, she termed her visit as the harbinger of “an era of cooperation between the two countries” and, “the new generation of Indians and Pakistanis will see a relationship that will hopefully be different from the past.” This is as it ought to be, but unfortunately the Pakistan-India equation is frightfully accident- prone.

Ms Khar’s Indian hosts were irked by her meetings with hard-line Kashmiri separatist Syed Ali Shah Geelani and the more moderate Hurriyat leader, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq. In an interview after the meeting she brushed the Indian objections aside and said: “Every Pakistani foreign minister who has come here has met the Hurriyat leadership...They are part of the democratic process that we all uphold, aspire to.”

The chief minister of Indian-administered Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, had a different take on the meetings which he said were “nothing to worry about.” He elaborated that for a negotiated solution of the Kashmir dispute, Islamabad will eventually “have to talk to the mainstream leadership also.”

An editorial in one of the Pakistani newspapers has recommended that this proposal should not be brushed aside if Islamabad and New Delhi are serious about a peaceful settlement in Kashmir. The argument is advanced that ultimately all stakeholders in Kashmir will have to be taken on board. The Indians should reach out to “the dissident Kashmiri” groups while Pakistan should not confine itself to talking only with the Hurriyat leadership but also broaden its engagement to include the entire spectrum of “political forces” in Kashmir.

The Calcutta Telegraph of July 3 put another spin on the meeting with the Hurriyat leadership. In an article with the sensational title, “Geelani shocker for Hina,” Sankarshan Thakkur developed the narrative that “Syed Ali Shah Geelani left Khar and her delegates a little stumped by demanding, for the first time, that the self-determination exercise should include Pakistan-occupied Kashmir as well.”

Geelani, according to Thakkur, confirmed to The Calcutta Telegraph that this was precisely what he had told foreign minister Khar, but there was nothing new in what he had said. The right of self-determination, he explained, applied to the “entirety of Kashmir as it existed before Aug 14, 1947.” This is also completely in line with Pakistan’s position on Kashmir, which has always been that it is a disputed territory and its final disposition is to be determined through a plebiscite under the auspices of the United Nations, as stipulated in several resolutions of the Security Council.

However, reports of Ms Khar’s briefing to the media in Lahore on her return from India are a trifle baffling. An English newspaper claimed that she “had made it clear to the Indians that Kashmir was an integral part of Pakistan and no efforts could succeed until a longstanding solution to the conflict was found.” If this is correct, and till now there has been no official rejection of the report, then it signifies a significant departure from Pakistan’s stance on the disputed territory. In the absence of a denial, Islamabad’s policy becomes the same as that of India, which also claims Kashmir as its integral part.

Surprisingly, as noted by former ambassador Asif Ezdi in his column on Monday, it was Indian External Affairs Minister S M Krishna, and not his Pakistani counterpart, who raised the issue of Kashmir at their joint press briefing. Other analysts have been vehemently critical of the 21-point joint communique because of its repeated emphasis on counterterrorism, with only a peripheral mention of Kashmir as an issue that needed to be resolved “by narrowing divergences and building convergences.”

Similarly, there have been acerbic comments that other issues such as Siachen, Sir Creek, the Wullar Barrage/Tulbul navigation project on which there could have been some progress were also dealt with perfunctorily in the joint statement.

But despite these shortcomings, Ms Khar’s maiden visit to India was successful. This was not because she scintillated with her own “spark of divine fire.” Nor did her brief contain anything more than the usual unimaginative formulations of Pakistan’s India policy. The reason lies elsewhere.

A perception seems to have emerged in India, as is evident from Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao’s recent statement, that it was a mistake to discontinue the dialogue with Islamabad after the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. She also conceded that “the prism through which Pakistan sees the issue of terrorism has definitely altered.” This welcome change is probably based on the assessment that Pakistan has realised that the non-state actors it once sponsored as instruments of its regional policy now pose the gravest threat to its own survival.

The Indian leadership, therefore, did not succumb to its usual knee-jerk reaction of blaming Pakistan for the terrorist attacks in Mumbai on July 13, and did not allow the incident to derail the talks between the two foreign ministers. This is a good beginning, because the only beneficiaries of tensions between the two countries are Al-Qaeda, its affiliates and other terrorist outfits.

The emphasis on combating terrorism in the Khar-Krishna joint statement may not be altogether misplaced because it is Pakistan’s foremost priority. However, an effective Pakistan-India counter-terrorism strategy will require: (i) mutual and balanced troop redeployment away from each others’ borders to strengthen Pakistan’s ongoing military operations against terrorist groups; (ii) real-time intelligence sharing which will also ensure that the dialogue process is not undermined by future acts of terrorism; and (iii) serious negotiations for a Kashmir settlement acceptable to the two countries and, above all, to the Kashmiri people.