Risky slippage in Indo-Pak relations

There is no let-up in the ongoing dispute between Pakistan and India or any sign that either side is inclined to take a more emollient line. It is very much a he-said-he-said shouting match which has taken an uptick since September 8 with the Foreign Office (FO) accusing New Delhi of sponsoring and financing terrorism in South Asia — which is the exact obverse of what Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said on more than one occasion in the last week — and that in forums such as the Association of South East Asian Nations and the G20 summit meeting. He was condemnatory of Pakistan as a regional proliferator of terrorism, an extremely serious allegation that our FO was never going to allow to slip by.



As has been observed in these columns previously, the normative state of relations between India and Pakistan is one of ‘managed instability’ that is persistent, sustainable and rarely gets beyond symbolic exchanges of fire along a ‘hot’ section of the Line of Control. Both sides are aware of where the unstated ‘red lines’ are and generally do not cross them. The model plays to the nationalist sentiment on both sides of the border, is sterile and virtually guaranteed to scupper any peace initiative launched by either side. Where this sense of stasis starts to come unglued and edge towards the dangerous rather than the theatrically inconvenient, is when one side or the other becomes the diplomatic equivalent of a loose cannon, and Mr Modi appears to be edging towards that. Mr Sharif, by contrast, since the last election has remained steadily pacific.

India appears to have miscalculated the consequences of the killing of the Kashmiri separatist Burhan Wani on July 8 from which a multitude of troubles have flowed. Pakistan, for its part, has no choice but to respond like-with-like and the tension ratchets upwards. Relations now are at their lowest ebb for many years, and whatever back-channels are in play are without the heft to influence the front-of-house game. There has been no out-of-the-box thinking by either side for decades, but this latest real and risky slippage needs to be arrested and soon.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 10^th, 2016.

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