The youthfulness of the new Pakistani foreign minister is in itself of little consequence for the revitalisation of India-Pakistan ties. Some optimism-laced commentary equating her youth with freshness of approach to bilateral relations is more wishful prose than properly weighed political judgment. Suggestions that older-generation Pakistan watchers in India, stuck in the groove of past attitudes, have reacted to her appointment with paucity of imagination is salon babble.

Yes, if her nomination was part of a rejuvenation of Pakistani politics as a whole, of a change in the mindset of the country wedded from now on to a forward-looking, modern, open-minded, tolerant, globally integrating agenda, then those clinging to cynicism would deserve wrist slapping by the bowled-over-by-Hina crowd.

But then, the ineffectual Zardari remains president, and the army, under the India-centric General Kayani, still controls Pakistan’s policies towards Bharat, Afghanistan and nuclear matters. The double-faced policy of simultaneously combating terrorism and nurturing it has not been abandoned. The Pakistani state apparatus remains unwilling to signal a decisive break with its terrorist affiliations by bringing to justice those responsible for 26/11. Two years and eight months after that massacre Pakistan has still not exhausted procedural excuses for delay. Now the ineffable Pakistani interior minister, who believes in star wars like characters invading the Mehran naval base and explains the Karachi killings as largely the elimination of inconvenient wives and mistresses, says that the transmission to India of voice samples of the 26/11 handlers, earlier promised, is not permissible under Pakistani law. Pakistan continues to expand its nuclear arsenal by working to equip itself with tactical nuclear weapons and develop the panoply of its missiles to deny the advantage it claims India has gained through its nuclear deal with the US.

Hina Rabbani Khar herself is the product of constituents of Pakistan’s body politic historically responsible for the vexatious state of India-Pakistan relations. Her feudal background and political passage through the army-linked PML(Q) hardly qualify her as an agent of change in Pakistan. That she is 34 and supposedly represents the youth surge in the country bears recalling that Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was 34 too when he became Pakistan’s foreign minister and his conduct towards India hardly constitutes a re-assuring precedent. If the parallel with a woman would be more apt, then it needs remembering that the attractive and youthful Benazir Bhutto, as prime minister, was a hand-maiden in the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, that of terrorism in Kashmir and the consolidation of the Pakistan-North Korea nexus in proliferating nuclear and missile technologies.

More relevant in gauging the Hina Rabbani Khar’s belief and brief would be to go beyond some de rigueur platitudinous generalisations about good neighbourliness she made. For someone calling for shedding the baggage of history she obstinately clung to it by pointedly meeting Yasin Malik before she landed in Delhi and confabulating with Kashmiri separatists after arriving here. Pakistan’s apologists in India say its leaders have met separatists before, that the Hurriyet is not of much consequence, and that Indian democracy has a large enough heart to overlook such provocation. No wonder Khar got encouraged to archly suggest that Indian democracy should have enough space in it for her to court those seeking a further partition of India.

For Pakistan, the Hurriyet represents a vital link to political dissidence in Kashmir, a handle to prevent India from internally closing the chapter of ‘consulting the wishes of the Kashmiri people’. By hobnobbing with the Kashmiri separatists under the Indian government’s nose, Pakistan asserts the legitimacy of its unfulfilled Kashmir-related demands and its position as a party to the Kashmir ‘dispute’. We have put ourselves in such a state of helplessness that we cannot stop either Pakistan or the Hurriyet to mock our sovereignty.

Having invested massive political capital in resuming the composite dialogue without satisfaction not only on the larger issue of terrorism but even on the specific case of 26/11, we are unable to emphatically counter Pakistan’s taunts for fear that good atmospherics that we keep artificially oxygenated by concessions may deteriorate, with policy-makers attracting public remonstration for naively engaging a disingenuous Pakistan with such perseverance. Worse, to justify our policy we make self-constraining statements about having no choice but to engage with Pakistan as a neighbour, about the no-dialogue option having crossed its use-by date, about a detectable change Pakistan’s position on terrorism, about improved levels of mutual confidence, etc. We thus not only reduce our diplomatic margin of manoeuvre vis-a-vis Pakistan, we dilute whatever pressure the US puts on Pakistan’s double dealing on terrorism.

We have ceded so much diplomatic ground that Khar finds our discourse on Pakistan’s involvement with terrorism “dated”, which, of course, her regurgitation of Pakistan’s 63-year-old demand for self-determination in Kashmir in accordance with UN resolutions is not. Siachen, Sir Creek, Wullar Barrage and such like issues that have dragged on for decades are obviously not “dated”, but terrorism, which is at the forefront of Indian and international concerns, has conveniently become old hat. She drives another nail into the terror-talks linkage by confidently advocating, as some enthusiasts on our side do, an “uninterrupted and uninterruptible” dialogue. She prefers to characterise the 26/11 terror outrage as an “incident”. Not wrongly perhaps as our joint statement manages no more than put the onus for progress on the Mumbai trial on Pakistan only in parenthesis, as an afterthought. And exploiting our readiness to be answerable for Samjhauta Express she draws a parallel between our tardiness in unravelling that crime and Pakistan’s procrastination in investigating 26/11. We have helped Pakistan to establish the political and moral equivalence between countless instances of terrorist mayhem unleashed by it against India for more than two decades and an isolated attack organised locally in India against visiting Pakistani nationals.

Khar easily slips into the bogus discourse of Pakistan being equally, if not more, a victim of terrorism as India. Again, we have short-sightedly ceded ground to Pakistan by endorsing this travesty of reality. India and Pakistan would both be victims of terror if Indian agencies or non-state actors reciprocally exported terror to Pakistan. Pakistan’s terror problem is homegrown, whereas ours is the consequence of use of terror by Pakistan as an instrument of state policy. We have allowed this vital distinction to be blurred.

It should not be enough for the future eye-appeal of India-Pakistan relations that the Pakistan foreign minister should have an attractive face; the ugly face of Pakistan’s policies that she would be implementing must improve too.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Published in New Indian Express Dated: 4^th August, 2011