India & Pakistan: A New Beginning

Months of bickering between India and Pakistan after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai provided the backdrop to the foreign secretary level talks in New Delhi last Thursday. Both aides therefore bent over backwards to emphasize that to expect substantive movement forward would be to chase a chimera. The sequence of developments unfolded along wholly expected lines. What precisely transpired behind closed doors, one knew, would not be aired in public. But it was also clear that in their press conferences held separately, each country would give a different spin to them.

That is what came to pass. Indian foreign secretary Nirupama Rao claimed that much of the time was spent discussing terror. The exchanges on Kashmir were brief and Afghanistan wasn't mentioned at all. Her Pakistani counterpart rebutted these claims in a tone that sometimes jarred on Indian ears. All this, however, should have come as no surprise at all. The indignant reactions to Salman Bashir's statements in some sectors of the media were plainly beside the point. The two foreign secretaries, meeting at a time when there is such a palpable lack of trust between the two countries, could do no more than reiterate their priority concerns, interests and anxieties. Their primary task was to reassure their domestic constituencies that they yielded no ground, made no unacceptable compromises, struck no deals that could rub their respective shareholders the wrong way.