Why India, Pakistan Have Little To Talk About

"India is not expecting any dramatic results from foreign secretary S Jaishankar's visit to Pakistan on Tuesday," a report from PTI said "emphasizing that his visit was a SAARC yatra and not a Pak yatra".

A retired diplomat said to me when I showed him this ‎story that it was leaked to play down expectations. Meaning India did not want to disappoint those who expected big things to come out of the meeting. That may well be the case and it is possible some breakthrough is around the corner in India's relations with Pakistan. However, my view is that the leak is reflective of current thinking in India, which is that relations with Pakistan were not important and the current state of cold relations would continue.

Let me explain why I say this. There are two principal issues on the table when India engages with Pakistan: terrorism and Kashmir. The former is the main issue for India and the latter the main one for Pakistan. The fact is that terrorism in India is at an all-time low. The total number of Indians killed in terrorist attacks in India in 2015 (outside the conflict theatres of Kashmir, the Northeast and the Maoist battlegrounds)‎ is zero.

Last year the total was four. The year before that it was 25, of whom 18 were killed in a Hyderabad blast claimed by Indian Mujahideen. The year before that (2012) the total was one. The narrative in the Indian media is that we are under siege from militant groups in Pakistan. ‎The fact is that so far as Islamist violence is concerned, Indians are safer than Europeans and India's cities are among the least affected by terrorism in the world.
 
Given this, it stands to reason that there is little that India needs from Pakistan because so far as terrorism is concerned, Pakistan has delivered, going purely by the numbers. It could be said that the trial of those who attacked Mumbai should move faster, and many Pakistanis also acknowledge this. But that is not the primary problem, which for India has always been 'cross-border terrorism' which, I repeat, is at all-time lows. If we insist that Pakistan is responsible for ratcheting up terrorism in India, we must accept that it is responsible for ratcheting it down. What the Modi government needs from Pakistan on that front it has already got and in my opinion it feels it doesn't need to engage seriously.

‎So far as Pakistan is concerned the main issue is Kashmir and the resolution of the dispute. The pressure on India here has been on two fronts. ‎The first was the militancy in the state which was supported by Pakistan and which keeps a large number of India's soldiers occupied. ‎The second was the reluctance of many Kashmiris to participate in the democratic process, choosing instead to focus on 'azadi'. ‎A total of 4,507 people were killed in Jammu & Kashmir in 2001, the most violent year in the state's history. Till 2003, the number of those killed exceeded 2,000 each year. Between 2004 and 2006 this dropped to under 1,000. Since 2011 the number has dropped to under 200 killed, including all terrorists, civilians and soldiers. This year is so far the safest and least violent in the last decade.

In Kashmir, the overall levels of violence are at their lowest in ‎25 years, meaning since separatism began. The army has begun scaling down in the state. ‎On the political front, ‎the numbers of those voting in Kashmir has touched the same levels they did before the current troubles (going back to the late 1980s) began. As many Kashmiris vote in Assembly elections as do Indians in other states. The participation of groups which empathise with the separatists, like Mufti Sayeed's PDP, has also helped integrate separatist thinking into mainstream politics. It would be totally wrong to think this means the end of the separatist sentiment. However, the pressure on India to act on Kashmir is, because of the factors above, close to zero.

Outside of these two issues, terrorism and Kashmir, trade is chugging along on legal and illegal channels. No big change can be anticipated there because of reluctance from Pakistan. The supply of energy to India through Pakistan from Central Asia is stuck because of problems in Afghanistan and not Pakistan. So what else is there to talk about?

Minor things like visas. Here the BJP has no sympathy for the families divided in Karachi because Muslims are not their constituency and represent no strong lobby group with this government, which couldn't care less how much they suffered on this front. Promoting tourism in Pakistan is also not one of its concerns. In any case, visa arrangements tend to be based on reciprocity and there is no way, given the attacks in Mumbai, that any Indian government, much less this one, will relax the visa rules for Pakistanis.

There is very little else to talk about because Pakistan is occupied with fighting its internal elements while the Modi government is focused constantly on its domestic agenda and on the seemingly unending election cycle.
 
For these reasons I think India believes it is comfortably placed and will probably play cold with Pakistan at the meeting next week. From it, as the PTI report suggests, we should expect very little.