Imran Khan’s olive branch to India
Pakistan’s new Prime Minister Imran Khan, no sooner confirmed in office, made a serious overture to India, appealing for a resumption of the suspended dialogue, including Kashmir, between the two nations, increasing trade, with the goals of regional stability, poverty alleviation and much else that would raise living standards and decrease want. These are noteworthy ends, but the means will require careful thought and policy calibration. The burdens of the past are remain heavy and disquieting and cannot be removed with stroke of a pen or with words, howver sincerely spoken.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s response, therefore, was warm but cautious. There would be no rush to Islamabad on an emotional-laden journey for pace, as was the case when the late Atal Bihari Vajpayee embarked on his ill-fated Lahore journey for peace in the early summer of 1999, only to learn on his return to New Delhi, that units of the Pakistan Army had surreptitiously occupied the remote Kargil heights. It took two months of fierce combat before the intruders were expelled, the effort claimed the lives of some 700 Indian soldiers.
The Kashmiri separatist leadership, BJP malcontents such as Yahwant Sinha and a once high Indian intelligence official now turned peacenik talk sentimentally of the late Mr Vajpayee’s Kashmir policy. For all the noble intent the policy yielded nothing then, and still less now. The separatist leaders were unyielding then, and are as stubborn today. The jihadi insurgency is more active at present than it was when Mr Vajpayee as in power. Under his watch, talks across the board with Hurriyat leadership, with the Pakistan military ruler Pervez Musharaf drew a blank.
Learning lessons from this faright past, Prime Minister Modi, while warm, Abjured the old pietas, laying particular stress on Pakistan’s need to actively cooperate on combating Islamist terrorism, which entailed abandoning export to India. The Mumbai terrorist assault on 26 N ovember 2008, is etched in every Indian heart and mind; the earlier assault of March 1993 was equally fraught. Both assaults were incubated in Pakistan by its military and intelligence services. In the first, 300 citizens died, hundreds were injured, in the second, 167 people, not all Indian, perished and the numbers of injured were very large indeed. There have been numerous attacks India, including Mumbai. This clearly was a well thought policy to destroy with a unconventional form of warfare, which has hurt India, certainly, but has left Pakistan in near ruin. Economically on its knees and now of the jihadi terrorism it once spawned, Pakistan needs normalcy to survive.
That said, Imran Khan’s emergence as his country’s Prime Minister is a genuine cause for hope, as he has been an achiever in whatever he has undertaken, from cricket to politics. He is well educated and worldly wise, having lived, studied and played in the UK for a considerable length of time. He has a deeper grasp of the Pakistan on its knees. He understands the ramifications of global politics. Furthermore, he speaks to the Pakistan Army from a position of strength, since it was the nexus of the old political establishment and the military that is responsible the country’s present plight.
Imran, thus, has a freer hand in starting putting things right and charting a new course. His first priority is mending the broken Pakistan economy. Restoring commercial ties with India is an imperative. The Indian economy is poised to become the fifth-largest in the world at the end of the current financial year ending March 31, 2019. It is in India’s national interest to take the regime change in Pakistan as the first true opportunity for a breakthrough in relations. It will be a test for Indian diplomacy and maturity. The imbecilic attack on Navjot Singh Siddhu’s presence at Imran Khan’s swearing-in by the lunatic fringe deserves the utmost contempt.
The danger is to recognize the prognostications of certain self-appointed media pundits, none more prominent than the Times of India’s Indrani Bagchi, whose edit-page call to the Indian government to begin talks with the Pakistan military which, if heeded, would surely undermine Prime Minister Imran Khan’s political and moral authority. He is the elected voice of his country and is thus accountable to his people. Bagchi is poisonously foolish.
Good sense versus combustible nonsense
The title of this piece was seeded in a recent BBC TV news broadcast, which included a predictable assault from the UK Foreign Secretary David Hunt, who, at a press conference in Washington, fired a number familiar broadsides at Russia and President Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader was accused of plotting to undermine Western democracy through election meddling, espionage and and Questions posed from the floor were amiable, well suited for an echo chamber.
The BBC in an unusual deviation from general practice, invited Sir Tony Trenton, a former British Ambassador to Russia, and subsequently head of Russian studies at Cambridge University, to slug it out with a young American woman member of Washinton’s Wilson Center. The woman opened and closed with a farrago of abuse on Russian oligarchs, President Putin; and claimed that the uneducated masses of Russia, brainwashed by the government would see the light when US and EU sanctions bit and brought the Russian economy crashing down over their heads and those of the oligarchs.
Easier said than done, remarked the urbane Tony Trenton, no wild radical or controversialist he, dismissed talk of the projected collapse as arrant nonsense, since sanctions had none of the desired effect. While sticking broadly to British grievance, would it not, asked Sir Tony, be sensible to open a dialogue on subjects where British and Russian converged, such the menace of Islamist terrorism, drug trafficking etc. The more congenial atmosphere would facilitate discussion of fraught issues that had brought Anglo-Russian relations into deep freeze. Russia, he said, was being driven into the arms of China, its trade with China now exceeded that of the European Union. Western sanctions, and robust Russian counter-measures were the true source of global tension and the likelihood of war.
Teasingly, Sir Tony referred to Russian history. Napoleon’s standoff with Imperial Russia in 1812 end in resounding French defeat; likewise Hitler’s assault on Soviet Russia in June 1941 turned out be catastrophe for the Nazi regime. The Russian people do not take kindly, he said, to foreign leaders dictating terms to their country and its leaders.
The BBC, in line with much of the Western media, sets great store on the findings of US intelligence agencies, but when they sacrosanct. Where were Saddam Hussain’s predicted ‘weapons of mass destruction’? Why didn’t these agencies fail to detect the events of 9/11? North Vietnam’s alleged attack on a US naval ship in the Gulf of Tonking in the summer of 1964 was falsely constructed by the Lyndon Johnson administration to pressure Congress into approving the President’s Vietnam war. CIA torture chambers in Iraq and elsewhere suffered indecent exposure, discrediting Washington’s mildewed narratives.
Opinion polls suggest that the Americans generally favour a good working US-Russian relationship as a guarantor of world peace. US Congressional elections in November for or against the Trump Administration could be critical for outcomes on war or peace.
Mea Culpa! India turns it around at Trent Bridge
The doomsayers were wrong. Following India’s abject performance in Second Test match at Lord’s, many feared an apocalypse for Indian cricket and cricketers. They rose Phoenix-like and turned the tables on their opponents with a resounding victory by 202 runs in the Third Test match at Trent Bridge, Nottingham. Still 1-2 down in the five-match series, the visitors have all to play for.
A team game, various players, notably Hardip Pandya, more cricket star than rock star with ball and bat, Jasprit Bumrah was devastating with his pace and lift; Ishant Sharma and Mohammed Shami chipped in with timely contributions.
Captain Virat Kohli led from the front with the bat (97 and 103). He was ably supported by Ajinka Rahane, Cheteswar Pujara, Shekhar Dhawan and K.L. Rahul. Well played, all.
Meanwhile, two new faces – Prithvi Shaw and Hanuma Vihari - are to join the Indian party for the final leg of the English tour. Their names were put forward by Under 19 coach and former star and captain, Rahul Dravid, when consulted by the selectors.
