Trump’s sweet talk

Fails to utter a single word of sympathy for the 7 million Kashmiris under lockdown for over 50 days

Why does one get the feeling that President Trump has successfully sweet-talked Pakistan into believing that Islamabad is as dear to him as New Delhi?

Just about two weeks before India revoked Article 370 of its Constitution thereby annexing Indian-occupied Kashmir (IOK), President Trump was sweet-talking PM Imran Khan at the White House, telling him, without our making a formal request for his intervention, that he was prepared to mediate between India and Pakistan. Trump had further sweetened the talk by confessing that he was making the offer at PM Modi’s request. India denied that PM Modi had made any such request. But the United States (US) insisted that he did.

PM Imran, on his return from Washington, was naturally in very high spirits and boasted at the airport that he felt like he was returning home with his second World Cup!

Most of the analyses of the White House events that appeared in our media attributed the sudden 180-degree change in Trump’s attitude — from sizzling hot to invitingly warm — towards Pakistan to our self-perceived potential to help the US successfully conclude the ongoing Taliban-Khalilzad peace talks.

Our analysts also saw — in this change of US attitude — a cooling off of the US desire to see India, its strategic partner and proxy in the Indo-Pacific region against China, play a role in the Afghan peace process. In fact, the pained public position that India took vis-à-vis its unceremonious ouster from Afghan matters and the angry reaction of Indian media to the seemingly unwelcome development gave the impression (perhaps a misleading one) that the US in order to placate Pakistan has finally decided to keep India out of the Afghan peace process.

But when President Trump called off the Taliban-Khalilzad peace talks earlier this month, without giving any cogent reason for declaring the talks “dead” and without consulting Pakistan, we were rudely shocked out of our apparent delusion. Was it all — the peace process, the US President uncharacteristically wooing Pakistan, fostering of the impression that US has finally agreed not to give India any role in Afghan matters — a ruse to string Pakistan along while India went ahead with its IOK designs? Perhaps one is reading too much into the developments. But perhaps one is not. Only time will tell how things will turn out in the future.

The second round of sweet-talking took place in New York, after almost six weeks following the IOK annexation. Mr Trump reiterated his promise to mediate between the two countries, qualifying his offer this time with “if both of you agree”. No mention of India’s request for the same, this time. Trump had met PM Khan within hours of his participation in a huge rally of Indian-Americans in Houston staged to honour PM Modi where the former offered the latter a joint fight against “Islamic terror”.

But the subjects of sweet-talking with PM Khan were much more mundane. President Trump kept praising both Khan and Modi, urging the two to meet to resolve the differences between their two countries, repeatedly offering to mediate.

But the long and short of it all is President Trump, despite all his sweet talk, was not able either to persuade the two to enter into bilateral negotiations nor are there any chances in the near future of India agreeing to third party mediation.

But what was extremely hurtful was Trump’s failure, despite his sweet talk, to utter a single word of sympathy for the 7-8 million IOK citizens under lockdown since over 50 days with food, medicine, education and access to communication or internet being denied to them. And what was even more hurtful was that there has been no condemnation of New Delhi from the US, of either the human rights violations on a mass scale with some 900,000 armed-to-teeth troops roaming IOK’s streets with orders to shoot anyone breaking the curfew, or violation of the basic tenets of democracy.

And the crushing tragedy was that President Trump did not mention the IOK catastrophe even in passing in his UNGA address.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 28^th, 2019.

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