India has slammed Pakistan with yet another note verbale earlier this month, an action taken against five cases of harassment of Indian diplomats in Islamabad. With the increasing frequency of such cases, the government thought it proper to register a protest, most of which were the cases of tailing.
Significantly, as per the official sources, India this month also green signalled the appointment of Pakistan’s new high commissioner Moin-ul-Haque. Haque was former ambassador to France, before Islamabad decided in May to send him to India and is expected to arrive in Delhi in the third week of August. India is expecting Haque to play a pragmatic role in the implementation of the understanding of the two countries to make Kartarpur corridor operational.
The two countries have in the past few months used the 1992 Code of Conduct for treatment of diplomatic/consular personnel in India and Pakistan to bring down the number of harassment incidents. On several occasions, things have threatened to fall apart like before Eid this year when both Pakistan and India accused each other of disrupting their respective iftar gatherings.
The two countries are currently in negotiations to provide Indian consular officials access to Kulbhushan Jadhav, as pressed by the ICJ. The government wants Pakistan to allow Indian officials to talk to him in private. Islamabad has said it will provide consular access “according to Pakistani laws”. The government is also hoping the euphoria in Pakistan over Islamabad’s, as a source put it, successful gaming of US President Donald Trump’s Afghanistan strategy will not embolden it to become more unreasonable in talks with India on issues like Jadhav and Kartarpur corridor.
As the government reiterated in Parliament last week, Pakistan is yet to take credible steps to end cross-border terrorism. However, while India is satisfied with the state department’s clarification that there was no change in the US position that Kashmir was a bilateral issue, the US decision to resume military aid to Pakistan in the form of $125 million worth of technical and logistics support for Pakistani F-16 fighter jets has led to the perception that Trump’s remarks were not merely a fleeting mental aberration.
