India’s olive branch

There was welcome, though admittedly surprising, news on the international front, as India appears to have responded in kind to the olive branch most recently offered by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif by issuing an invite for Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto to attend the upcoming Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) foreign ministers’ moot, scheduled to be held in Goa in early May. If Pakistan accepts the invite, it will be the first visit by a Pakistani foreign minister in 12 years. Incidentally, the last Pakistani FM to visit India was Hina Rabbani Khar — the incumbent state minister for foreign affairs.

Relations with India have been at a prolonged low for several years. Despite several public efforts by Pakistani leaders and behind-the-scenes efforts from both sides to get something going, India’s leaders have undermined any potential normalisation by continually attacking and threatening Pakistan as part of their domestic political messaging. But Shehbaz’s recent effort also went further than many in the past, according to analysts on both sides of the border, because sincerely pursuing peace with India is also in Pakistan’s economic interest. Although Shehbaz and the PDM government have maintained the official stance since India’s 2019 abrogation of Article 370 of its Constitution — which gave special status to the disputed Kashmir region — this stance itself was an adaption of the earlier longstanding position to‘resolve Kashmir first’ after which resolution to almost all other bilateral disputes could be negotiated quite quickly.

Even though the PM Office issued a statement claiming“negotiations are not possible” until India reverses the revocation, talks on some issues may prove to each side if the other is acting in good faith, and ideally, this may be enough to convince India that putting Article 370 back on the books is worth the benefit to be gained through a resolution to the Kashmir dispute and full normalisation of ties with Pakistan.