PM takes new shot at settling Pak question

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is leading the charge to restart the composite dialogue process with Pakistan, with foreign secretary-level talks between the two countries to be held soon, as well as conversations with the Pakistani establishment when Home Minister P Chidambaram visits Islamabad for Saarc talks later this month.

The PM is said to be determined to get the dialogue with Pakistan back on firm ground, so that moderates in both countries can take charge of the process, and not allow it to be hijacked by events and people over which he doesn’t have control.

Moreover, with the international community refocusing strategies in Afghanistan, Delhi was coming under some pressure to restore the political dialogue with Pakistan, so as to reassure Islamabad that it would not take advantage if Pakistan moved some of its troops on the India-Pakistan border to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

“The absence of a dialogue with Pakistan, a year and a half after the Mumbai attacks, could not be termed foreign policy,” the sources said.

The recent IPL fiasco is a case in point, sources said, referring to the Prime Minister’s fury when he learnt that a perfectly good opportunity which had presented itself over the presence of Pakistani cricketers in India had been squandered.

Whether or not IPL’s Lalit Modi should be held responsible for queering the pitch vis-à-vis the Pakistani cricketers, the sources said the resulting fiasco was a classic manifestation of how things, in a power vacuum, could turn out to have the opposite effect of what was intended.

With National Security Advisor and former high commissioner to Pakistan, Shivshankar Menon, to back him, the PM is set to be preparing the ground for a full-fledged resumption of dialogue that will culminate in his visit to Pakistan this year.

With the successful completion of the Indo-US nuclear deal behind him and with India having weathered the recession fairly easily, Manmohan Singh feels the time is now ripe to unveil a multi-level agenda with Pakistan which incorporates the formal composite dialogue — in which terrorism is a major item on the agenda — intensifying civil society interactions, upping conversations with intelligence agencies and enhancing parliamentary exchanges.

India has often proposed talks between the two armies, knowing fully well that the Pakistani army continues to wield the real power in Pakistan. But, Pakistan has always turned that down.

However, sources said that when Pakistan offered to send its deputy director in the ISI (the number two or three person in the hierarchy) to India for talks soon after the Mumbai attacks, Delhi turned down the offer.

It is not clear what place the Sharm-el Sheikh statement will have in the to-be-resumed composite dialogue process, but the sources pointed out that the Pakistani media was itself divided over the reference to Balochistan, simply because it did not want India, an outside power, to discuss it.

The sources confirmed that Manmohan Singh had planned a visit to Pakistan in early 2007, around the time the back-channel dialogue between the two countries over Kashmir had resulted in considerable compromise. In fact, the streets of Gah village, the birthplace of Manmohan Singh, had even been lined with solar energy lights by The Energy & Research Institute.

Then Pervez Musharraf lost power in Pakistan and the opportunity was lost. Now the PM wanted to take another shot at settling the Pakistan question, the sources said.