For the first time in at least 12 years, a Pakistan Foreign Minister visited India as Bilawal Bhutto Zardari landed in Goa to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Foreign Ministers meeting held on May 4 and 5. The visit garnered many eyeballs with speculations over India-Pakistan relations heading towards improvement.
However, by the time this meeting ended on Friday with an intense face-off between India and Pakistan over terror, with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar accusing his Pakistani counterpart Bilawal Bhutto Zardari of being a “justifier [and] spokesperson of a terrorism industry”.
Responding to remarks made by Bhutto Zardari at a meeting of SCO foreign ministers and at a subsequent news conference, Jaishankar said India will counter and delegitimize cross-border terrorism and call out Pakistan’s backing for it.
He lashed out at Bhutto Zardari’s efforts to link the resumption of dialogue to the restoration of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status, saying the only issue up for discussion would be Islamabad’s vacation of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
Jaishankar rubbished Bhutto Zardari’s remarks at the news conference that criticised the holding of a G20 meeting in Srinagar and the abrogation of Article 370 which gave special status to Jammu and Kashmir, and said Pakistan has no locus standi on these matters.
Jaishankar said that Pakistan’s credibility on the matter of terrorism was depleting faster than its Forex reserves.
Bhutto’s India visit was marred by a terror attack that claimed the lives of five Indian Army jawans in Jammu and Kashmir’s Rajouri. The operation launched by the Indian Army to flush out the terrorists continued in Jammu and Kashmir’s Rajouri in the wee hours of Saturday in which one terrorist was killed.
The anti-terror operation was launched to flush out terrorists who were responsible for a recent attack on the army in Poonch in which five soldiers were killed.
Such high-profile visits between India and Pakistan are often followed by acts of cross-border terrorism. In February 1999, the then Prime Minister of India, Atal Bihari Vajpayee travelled to Pakistan on a bus during its inaugural run and was received by his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif.
However, soon after, the Kargil War broke out between May and July 1999, in which Indian forces suffered 527 casualties and 1,363 injuries.
The Agra Summit in July 2001 was a historic summit between then-PM Vajpayee and Pakistani President Pervez Musharaf. However, in December of the same year, Parliament was attacked, claiming the lives of around 14 people, by militants affiliated with JeM and Lashkar-e-Taiba.
In 2008, the then-foreign minister of Pakistan, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, was in Delhi when the Mumbai attacks took place. Pranab Mukherjee, who was then the external affairs minister, wrote in his autobiography that he interrupted Qureshi’s press conference by calling a journalist and informing him that he should leave India immediately in the wake of the terror strike in Mumbai.
In December 2015, PM Modi made a surprise stopover to Lahore and met Nawaz Sharif, marking the first time an Indian prime minister had visited Pakistan in more than a decade. However, barely a week later, the Pathankot terror attack took place on January 2, 2016, in which six armed terrorists infiltrated the Pathankot Air Base, causing the death of around seven Indian soldiers.
Pakistan has been bleeding India with terrorist attacks since past 40 years, starting with Punjab and then Kashmir. Incidentally, it was Bhutto Zaradri’s maternal grandfather and former Prime Minister of Pakistan, late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who declared a “thousand-year war” against India, after Bangladesh was carved out of Pakistan in 1971.
Former Pakistani Army Chief late General Zia-ul-Haq gave form to Bhutto’s “thousand years war” with the ‘bleeding India through a thousand cuts’ doctrine, using covert and low-intensity warfare with militancy and infiltration. This policy was first executed during the Punjab insurgency and then in Kashmir insurgency, starting in the 1980s.
That’s why Pakistan playing victim card doesn’t have any bearing. A country having a footprint almost everywhere in the global terror map can’t be a victim of terrorism. It’s only reaping what it has sowed till now.
This is something, even the international fraternity has understood very well. That’s why Pakistan stands isolated in the world stage today. Unfortunately for the people of Pakistan, their successive rulers haven’t understood that their ‘hate India’ policy has sunk their economy and left them scrambling for every bit of food grain.
Today Pakistan needs India and not the opposite. By opening up its borders and starting trade with India can help resurrect it’s fledging economy. Pakistan’s rural areas recorded 40.2% food inflation in April. Consumer prices rose to 36.4% in April from a year earlier, the highest since 1964, the Pakistan statistics bureau has said.
But, the hatred for India is the only tonic for political survival in Pakistan, and it is paying heavily for it.
However, it is also important to state here that while the messaging was rightly strong, Jaishankar should have kept in mind that he is the Foreign Minister of a country, which is currently heading the SCO and also a key member of the grouping. Perhaps he could have avoided calling Bhutto Zardari “the spokesperson of terrorism”, while he was a guest in his country.
Diplomacy is all about messaging through subtle articulation. And who should know this better than our Foreign Minister, who has been a career diplomat himself.
