As the year rushes to an end, some good news is what it required to keep the mood up and it was given to the country by none other than the Prime Minister himself who acted on an impulse and ‘dropped by’ Pakistan to meet his counterpart on the latter’s birthday. No other Indian Prime Minister has done so – drop by the neighbours – and there is perhaps no other Indian Prime Minister who would have acted on a casual request from the neighbouring country’s Prime Minister to drop by. Prime Minister Narendra Modi did just that.
On Christmas day, when media houses were having a slow news day, Modi took everybody, even his ministers and party, by surprise when he tweeted that he would be dropping by at Lahore on his way back from Kabul. He had landed in Kabul in the morning after taking off from Moscow. He made the visit sound so casual, almost as if he was another ordinary citizen stopping over at the neighbour’s for a pakora. Well, pakoras he did eat at the neighbour’s, served by the Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif at his family home outside of Lahore. But over the pakoras, the two Prime Ministers also initiated what can hopefully be the start of a lasting peace process between the two countries. And it all happened after Modi had, earlier in the morning, made veiled references to Pakistan sponsoring terrorism though he didn’t name the country, when in Kabul.
Indo-Pak ties that have never been strong, though there has been an improvement of late. After Modi and Sharif met last month in Paris, on the sidelines of the climate summit, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj travelled to Pakistan earlier this month and the dialogue process between the two countries has been started. The friendship between the two Prime Ministers started when Modi invited the leaders of the SAARC nations to his swearing in ceremony. Sharif accepted the invitation and there was that famous photo-op of the two leaders shaking hands. It continued, though ever so often there are reports of guns firing across the international border or the line of control, or of terrorists entering the country from across the Radcliffe line.
The opposition criticized this little detour, but not all of them. Congress made the usual noises, but the Communists backed it and the Shiv Sena asked whether it would lead to any action against terror. The last of course is what would be on everyone’s mind. There have been plenty of skirmishes on the border and terrors attacks in India have had Pakistan links. Modi’s visit to Pakistan was surely unorthodox, but it does set the ball rolling on dialogue between the two neighbours, which is what the two countries really need to take the ties further. Only time will tell whether there will be any tangible results, with regard to an end to terror, of this stopover.
Another time an Indian Prime Minister went to Pakistan, also Lahore, was Atal Behari Vajpayee in 1999 and the ties between the two countries that were just firming up had taken a bad beating with the Kargil war that followed months later. And, that perhaps is what’s bothering a few people. Commentators are already saying that this fragile friendship initiated by Modi can last only until the next big terror attack from Pakistan that will spoil the peace. But for now, there is something to look forward to and Modi has ensured that someday having breakfast in Kabul, lunch in Lahore and dinner in New Delhi, or vice versa, could become a possibility for the citizens of the three nations.
