WHAT DIALOGUE?

 

 

 

 

 

 

TIME has come for India to remind the United States -- and also the world -- that expecting a dialogue with Pakistan to resolve various issues between the two countries is not just immature but also ignorant of the reality. Even as the United States State Department has expected resolution of contentious issues between India and Pakistan through dialogue, it appears to have blind-folded itself from the reality of the crude diplomatic culture Pakistan has been following for decades on end. The US, therefore, needs to be told that Pakistan is not the country with which issues could be sorted out through dialogue and discussion on subjects of mutual interests. For, advising India (and Pakistan) to resort to dialogue, is nothing but pompous and devoid of a proper understanding of the reality of the protracted India-Pakistan discord. It is most unfortunate that the US has forgotten the reality of Pakistan’s cantankerousness on every issue not just with India but with any country in the world. Every effort by India to establish a dialogue with Pakistan in the past seventy-five years has failed miserably and the Pakistani leadership has not stopped considering India as Enemy Number One.

 

It has also never faltered in using terrorism as a tool of its foreign policy management, and has made every possible effort to disturb or fail any effort by India -- and also by other countries -- to negotiate for peace and harmony between the two estranged neighbours. The world has not missed even a single detail of this seventy-five-year history right from the moment Pakistani invaders stormed into Kashmir right at the dawn of Independence and annexed some portion of the region and kept it under its illegal occupation. The world also has seen how Pakistan has become the face of global Islamic terrorism and how India and many countries -- including the US -- have tried their best, though to no avail, to wean Pakistan away from using terror as a foreign-policy-tool. The world has known how Pakistan has always tried to raise the Kashmir issue without any locus standi at different international forums including the United Nations and has refused to acknowledge that it uses terror as its tool to cower India. Despite this, the United States has shown a rawness to suggest that dialogue should be the way for India and Pakistan to sort out issues between them. This stance by the US State Department, thus, hints at some agenda of the American leadership that it would never let out in public domain.

 

Hence the need for India to make it clear to the US not to offer hollow and impractical advice to India vis-a-vis Pakistan. India must tell the US that a dialogue between the two countries would be possible only when Pakistan mends its ways. Of course, history offers enough evidence of how the US has often sided with Pakistan even though it knew that the Indian stance on all issues has been logically and morally correct. No matter the changed American conduct -- in bits and pieces -- as regards Pakistan -- in the past some time, the overall US position has been of supporting Islamabad in its regional geopolitics (of whatever crudeness). True, in the past ten years, the American view of the Indian positions on different issues has undergone a big transformation. Yet, as is evident from the latest State Department’s advice, it needs to be told that India’s position vis-a-vis Pakistan is based on real-life experience of crude Pakistani diplomacy in which terrorism and cantankerousness are major tools. The US -- and the world -- needs to be told in no uncertain terms that no dialogue is possible with Pakistan until Islamabad changes its conduct fully.