That may be worrisome enough for some; it will be more worrisome if Pakistan gets away by blaming India for the fruitless exercise that is apparently gone through to please Washington, the unofficial referee who intervenes when it feels that things between the two neighbours may spin out of control. Pakistan has long been playing its one-note jarring melody about ‘inflexible’ India. It accuses India of being ‘obsessed’ with ‘one issue’—the inhuman attacks on Mumbai by Pakistani terrorists on November 26, 2008.

The insidious falsehood of this Pakistani propaganda has not been adequately rebutted by India. First of all, it is ridiculous of Pakistan to talk of India’s ‘obsession’ with a ‘single’ issue. Throughout the turbulent history of Indo-Pak relations, even during the short-lived but exceptional moments of camaraderie, Pakistan had maintained that ‘normal’ relations with India were not possible without the resolution of the ‘core’ issue, the Kashmir ‘dispute’. It has always been a scarcely disguised demand from India to hand over Kashmir to Pakistan.

The Pakistanis advance all sorts of justifications for their one-note dissonance on Kashmir, the chief one being its Muslim majority population. That is Pakistan’s way of claiming that the two-nation theory will apply in perpetuity and all areas in the Indian union where Muslims population exceeds that of the other communities must be ceded to the land of the pure.

There is a clear purpose behind the ridicule that the Pakistanis heap on India for its ‘obsession’ with 26/11 and ‘one man’—Hafeez Saeed, the head of a terror outfit that is encouraged by the state to frequently changes its name. Often the Pakistanis describe this so-called Indian ‘obsession’ in derogatory terms to heighten their scorn, which is in line with their policy of relentlessly spreading hatred for India and to contrast their alleged ‘reasonableness’ with India’s ‘intransigence’ etc, especially when India is so fixated on action against Hafeez Saeed.

The Pakistani desperation to deflect attention from 26/11 and the mastermind of those attacks, Hafeez Saeed, arises from something more sinister. By harping on the ‘non-state’ character of the perpetrators of 26/11, the Pakistanis think their state machinery such as the ISI is entitled to be detached from links to terror attacks on Indian targets.

As for Saeed, the charade that Pakistan spins around him is a consequence of its efforts to project him as a saint who heads a ‘humanitarian’ mission. The Pakistanis take care to pretend that they have never heard Hafeez Saeed specifically attack India. His vitriolic speeches and his calls for jihad against India are described as religious preaching! Talking about jihad is not blasphemous because it does have religious sanction.

If India falls in a carefully laid out Pakistani trap or is successfully persuaded by an increasingly pro-Pakistan US to conceded that Pakistan’s state machinery is not linked to the 26/11 attacks, Pakistan will secure a fool-proof licence, an insurance, for disowning responsibility for all future terror attacks on Indian targets.

If, as some reports suggest, a plan for another terror attack bigger than the Mumbai attack has been hatched by the alleged ‘non-state’ actors Pakistan must be in a hurry to secure that ‘licence.’

Bolstered by the outburst of charity by the US that will see injection of unprecedented scale of US aid, both cash and military, into the land of the pure which is perennially in need of foreign aid, Pakistan will be less and less interested in any ‘meaningful’ dialogue with India. There cannot be even an iota of doubt that much of that generous US aid will be used by Pakistan to harm India, possibly by planning another Kargil-type or even a full-scale war with India.

India cannot waste its time and energies on devising ways of keeping channels open or partially open for talks with the difficult western neighbour that has for 60 years held that it cannot live in peace with India without Kashmir. But credit the Pakistanis for always thinking ahead of Indians. When some optimists on either side of the border started talking of the possibility of finding a commonly acceptable solution to the single-point agenda of Kashmir, Pakistan has quickly started to build up another ‘issue’ that will bedevil relations between the two countries: the Indus water flow from India to Kashmir.

A campaign has been on in Pakistan to implant the idea that India is diverting water from the rivers flowing from the Himalayas for its own use, denying the rights of Pakistan under the World Bank negotiated Indus Water Treaty. Such stories are easily lapped up in a country where they were being told recently that the terrorists who were operating in the Swat valley were actually Gorkhas of the Indian Army! This was, of course, of a piece with the fiction that the insurgency in Balochistan is entirely Indian sponsored and that ‘RAW’ agents are behind all the terror attacks in Pakistan, including the one on Sri Lankan cricketers.

It may not have attracted enough attention in India, but in Pakistan the state machinery, the media the civil society et al, everybody is convinced by now that India is responsible for their brush with terrorism. Now India plans to choke Pakistan’s legitimate river water supplies and the matter needs to be ‘resolved’—like Kashmir on terms that are acceptable to Pakistan.

Clearly, dialogue with such a country can be of little help, whether carried through ‘open’ channel or ‘back channel.’

Printer-Friendly Version