Shobori Ganguli

Narendra Modi has done well to draw Pakistan out and engage with it in full international glare. However, it will have to cope with Islamabad’s repeated attempts to raise the Kashmir issue at the United Nations

Even as this column appears in print, India would be engaging in some form of retaliatory gunfire along the Line of Control, or battling an infiltration attempt in Kashmir, or perhaps falling victim to a low intensity terror strike in a border village with limited casualties, or even capturing a terror operative alive. Unfortunately, for a media, forever chasing newsbreaks, the ceaseless daily provocations from across our western borders are barely a footnote compared to the ostensibly more exciting headlines of a politician’s pet labrador in Delhi being produced as a star witness in a domestic violence case or widespread celebrations over Facebook’s ‘dislike’ button.

However, minor as each incident may be in scale, the chilling regularity with which Pakistan’s state and non-state actors are claiming Indian lives is cause for serious concern. Dubbed as skirmishes, these border face-offs, while not as consuming as an all-out war, are bleeding India incrementally. In the past year alone, more than a score of civilians and non-civilians have fallen prey to Pakistani bullets. The fact that India, during this period, may have delivered greater casualties across the border provides little solace.

While the visual media can barely be faulted for its obsession with eyeball-grabbing footage of politicians in trouble or celebs on the ramp, India’s responses to the repeated and provocative ceasefire violations appear somewhat inscrutable. Arguably, the stated Indian position that the cost of “unprovoked firing” would be “unaffordable” for Pakistan, is sound in principle. It serves to warn Pakistan of dire consequences in the event of a full-blown flare-up. Except, such warnings are being routinely met by a brazen Pakistani establishment bellowing about a “befitting reply,” as a nuclear state, to “Indian aggression”.

This misplaced machismo powers the unilateral provocations by the Pakistan Army as also constant attempts by operatives of the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba and its associates to slither into India. It is another matter that unlike in the 1990s, when the Kargil war got the world duly worried about the subcontinent being a possible nuclear flashpoint, the changed geopolitical dynamics of the 21st century make Pakistan’s martial rhetoric ring hollow.

That Pakistan’s continuing intransigence will not be tenable over any prolonged length of time possibly explains India’s composure at the present juncture. New Delhi’s calibrated responses in the past year could well be intended to tire out both Pakistan’s beleaguered political establishment and its military.

Admittedly, the Pakistan that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has inherited as a neighbour, is a pale shadow of what former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had to deal with in Lahore and subsequently at Kargil. The intervening years have witnessed Pakistan’s steady emasculation at the hands of the United States, the culmination of which enthralled the world as America went in hot pursuit of Osama bin Laden into Pakistan’s own backyard. Indeed, more than a decade since it was steered by General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan today stands defanged.

However, India can ill-afford to lose sight of the fact that unlike the US, it shares a contiguous border with Pakistan that has the dangerous potential of inflicting physical wounds which, though not lethal, may yet prove festering. To that end, Mr Modi, so far, has done well to draw Pakistan out and engage with it in full international glare, be it at his swearing-in ceremony last year when he extended a generous invitation to Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, among other South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation heads of state, or on a multilateral forum like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation at Ufa, where India deliberately sought a bilateral meeting with Pakistan. The intense global attention on these occasions ensured that Mr Modi now has an edge in diplomatic goodwill, hitherto Pakistan’s key weapon against India.

Mr Modi’s aggressive pitch for India in the Gulf region is already paying rich dividends with the United Arab Emirates agreeing to the Indian request of investigating Dawood Ibrahim’s assets in that country, a plea obdurately rejected by Pakistan for years. Clearly, Mr Modi’s Gulf diplomacy as also his push to India’s Connect Central Asia policy — key moves to provide India economic linkages in this region — have sufficiently punctured the ball of immunity that Pakistan has traditionally enjoyed in the Arab-Islamic world.

Mr Modi’s spectacular sojourns in the region have helped these countries wake up to India’s growth which makes it much more worthy as an economic partner than an embattled Pakistan as a political ally. Similarly, Mr Modi’s impressive personal connect with US President Barak Obama has helped New Delhi gain a patient and sensitive listener in Washington.

In this scenario of relative global sensitivity to India vis-à-vis Pakistan, the two countries are set to cross each other’s paths on the traditional battle turf of the United Nations General Assembly in New York later this month, where Pakistan will raise the age-old bogey of Kashmir and draw India down to a response. It must be borne in mind that for Pakistan, Kashmir and anti-India rhetoric is that fragile glue, which holds its military and political establishments together even when the two are working at cross purposes, an adhesive critical to the survival of the two vital organs of Pakistan. At the United Nations General Assembly, therefore, Mr Sharif will predictably play this game of survival because anti-India rhetoric is pure oxygen for his domestic constituency.

According to news reports, India is ready to checkmate Pakistan this time round, with External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj slated to address the General Assembly rather than Mr Modi. While in the normal scheme of things, Mr Modi would have spoken ahead of Mr Sharif in the alphabetical order of countries, as Ms Swaraj will follow Mr Sharif, thereby giving India ample time and ammunition to mount a verbal counterattack if Kashmir is contested. And contested it will be, since no Pakistani leader, to this day, has been strong enough to challenge the domestic compulsion of raising Kashmir at the UN.

However, once back to the subcontinent, and given the prickly situation at the LoC, India must re-negotiate the terms of bilateral business with Pakistan, away from the international arc lights where symbolism is often an adequate tool of diplomacy. The past year has seen India repeatedly abort Foreign Secretary level talks and National Security Advisor level talks owing to Pakistan’s border belligerence. A complete lack of communication, however, could be counter-productive for India as those violations escalate. Therefore, how best to get Pakistan back to the bilateral negotiating table could well be the Modi Government’s biggest diplomatic challenge yet.

Courtesy: Pioneer Friday, 18 September 2015