AP Photo

Discourse between India and Pakistan can be deceptive - like when cats hiss. You can never quite tell dalliance from discord. The fact remains that at different levels, despite their occasional shrill rhetoric, contacts have been going on between Delhi and Islamabad, including some unprecedented highly sensitive lines of communication, which neither side publicizes. India has also kick-started parallel efforts aimed at reaching out to Kashmiri opinion, with Pakistan in the loop.

At the responsible level of leadership in both India and Pakistan, there is a realization that extremism and terrorism do not and should not provide scope ...