“Are India and Pakistan an execution away from possibly the worst crisis in South Asia since the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008?” was the opening sentence in a piece Indian journalist Barkha Dutt wrote for The Washington Post on April 16, 2017.
The reference was to Kulbhushan Jadhav, an Indian awaiting execution in a Pakistani jail. The 46-year-old Jadhav was arrested in the restive Balochistan province (Pakistan) or kidnapped from Iran (India) on March 3 last year. He is either a spy and a former navy officer (Pakistan) or an innocent businessman (India). No doubt, mystery shrouds his arrest and subsequent trial. What is beyond doubt is he is the latest pawn in an Indo-Pak chess game.
Even though there is no room for alarm of the kind expressed by Dutt, Indo-Pak relations were going through some very dark and dangerous days even before Jadhav’s death sentence. Last year was particularly bad. 2016 started with militants, supposedly from Pakistan, storming the Pathankot airbase in Punjab and killing seven security personnel. This dampened the hopes raised by a visit to Lahore by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the occasion of the birthday of his counterpart Nawaz Sharif on Dec. 25, 2015. Earlier, there was a high-level visit by an Indian delegation led by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to Islamabad in which the two countries agreed to revive the stalled peace process.
In September 2016, militants assaulted an army camp in Uri and killed 19 soldiers. India retaliated by staging “surgical strikes” on what New Delhi described as “terror launch pads” in Kashmir under Pakistani control. In late November, another terror attack took place at an army camp in Indian Kashmir’s Nagrota in which seven soldiers were killed, leading to further strains in ties and a war-like situation on the Line of Control (LoC) dividing the two Kashmirs. Just days after the assault, the two sides clashed at the UN General Assembly’s annual session, blaming each other for militancy and violation of human rights.
All this should be seen against the background of what has been going on in Indian Kashmir since July 8, 2016 after Indian security forces killed Burhan Wani, a charismatic Kashmiri youth leader.
Young Kashmiris, men and women, are on the streets calling for independence from India and throwing stones at security forces. Clashes between security forces and agitating students are a familiar sight. According to official estimates, since 1989, about 45,000 people have been killed in Kashmir. Unofficial estimates are much higher.
What Pakistan has done is to throw a new element into the boiling cauldron. But fears of a nuclear conflagration are exaggerated. If the past is any guide, leaders of India and Pakistan know where to stop.
Sajjan Jindal’s meeting with Sharif on Thursday is the latest evidence. Indian steel magnate held talks with Sharif at the latter’s private residence in Murree, some 45 km from Islamabad. This means that the South Asian rivals keep channels of back-channel diplomacy open even amid strains in ties. Jindal, a close friend of Modi’s, will try to arrange a meeting between Indian and Pakistani prime ministers on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit to be held in June in Astana, Kazakhstan.
Of course, the disputes between India and Pakistan can’t be settled in one meeting or a series of summits. Some of the problems (Kashmir for one) are as old as India’s partition in 1947.
But they may pave the way to confidence building measures — such as hotlines, cultural and people-to-people exchanges, easing of visa restrictions and prior notifications of military exercises — that can help promote good neighborly relations. They are needed to develop trust between the two and reduce tensions along the sensitive, fragile and overly militarized Line of Control. Cross-border shelling and exchanges of gunfire are a daily occurrence in the disputed region of Kashmir. This should stop.
