The Nawaz-Modi waltz

Perennial tensions between India and Pakistan seem to be fading as the hyphenated neighbours penned a fresh chapter in their otherwise frosty relationship.

Indian Premier Narendra Modi, a bona fide hardliner, made a brief stopover in Lahore last week to greet Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on his birthday. A richly symbolic gesture, the recent rendezvous is yet another closely choreographed step in the diplomatic waltz between Nawaz and his Indian counterpart that comes after a series of unceremonious meetings between the two leaders.

Nawaz has secured another jewel for his crown by hosting the second Indian leader in Lahore after a hiatus of 17 strained years that were punctuated by events that ruined prospects of detente.

History may very well be repeating itself. Nine months after forming a coalition government, in February 1999, India’s former prime minister and a patriarch of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, Atal Behari Vajpayee, crossed the Wagah border and visited Lahore.

As a goodwill gesture, Vajpayee launched the Lahore-Delhi Bus Service and inked the Lahore Agreement with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. But the diplomatic putsch was reversed as quickly as it had started. Talk of rapprochement between the archrivals was traded for border tensions and stiff postures following the Kargil war.

While Modi’s sojourn may not yield any immediate results, the brief stopover by the Indian leader raises hopes that negotiations between the nuclear-armed neighbours might finally make progress after decades of animosity.

It has often been said that years of back-channel negotiations have yielded an agreed set of common denominators for resolving a host of unresolved issues between the two countries. What has been missing though is political will. If Friday’s bonhomie between the two prime ministers is anything to go by, we may be witnessing the most opportune moment for demonstrating that very political will, the absence of which has halted progress thus far.

Modi’s spontaneous decision to visit Pakistan is likely to add momentum to the stop-and-start reconciliation process between the two nations, that for so long has been plagued by distrust and undue defiance. So for the naysayers, let’s give peace another chance!

Published in The Express Tribune, December 29^th, 2015.