No peace in sight

Any question about who is responsible for the permanent state of tension in South Asia should be excised by Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj’s venomous speech at the UN General Assembly Session in New York. In a bizarre and irresponsible address, she denounced Pakistan for producing terrorists while India has been minting doctors, engineers and scholars. Not only was Swaraj’s vituperative tone unbecoming of a country’s representative to the world, she was wrong on the facts too. She said India had offered the hand of friendship but Pakistan was responsible for aborting the peace process. In fact, it is Pakistan that has consistently tried to kick start talks but, ever since Narendra Modi has taken power, India has rebuffed any such initiative. Just about the only communication between the two sides recently has been the hotline contact made by our DGMO to his counterpart last week after India yet again started shelling across the Line of Control and killed six people. Swaraj argued that the Simla Agreement of 1972 – which was imposed on Pakistan through the barrel of a gun – committed both countries to settle outstanding issues. She may not have heard Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi’s speech to the same General Assembly just two days earlier, where he said Pakistan was open to talks with India. What seems to have set Swaraj off was Abbasi’s mention of Kashmir and India’s patronage of militant groups within our country. Everything Abbasi had to say was truthful and even relatively measured given the scale of war crimes committed by India in Kashmir.

Abbasi’s speech seems to have had quite an effect: with India’s first secretary to the UN, Enam Gambhir, using her right to reply to denounce Pakistan as “Terroristan”. To some, the undiplomatic language used by Gambhir and Swaraj would have been best ignored but in this war of words, there was little option but to reply in kind. Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the UN Maleeha Lodhi used her own right to reply to what she called “an orgy of slander against Pakistan.” Lodhi called India the mother of terrorism and brought up Modi’s massacres in Gujarat, the brutal occupation of Kashmir and the confessed terrorism of Indian spy Kulbhushan Yadav.

The links between India and terrorism in the region are becoming difficult to ignore. There have been consistent reports of its interference in Balochistan but now some voices in India are even acknowledging that it patronises the TTP. Just last week, right-wing Indian security analyst Bharat Karnad wrote in the Hindustan Times about India’s support for the TTP and that it may be asked by US Secretary of Defence James Mattis to moderate that support during his upcoming visit. It has long been clear that in its hunger for regional dominance India is willing to aid and abet militancy. Now that this inconvenient truth has been pointed out by Pakistan in the UN, it could do little else but resort to name-calling and slander. All that said and done, though, both countries need to recognise one undeniable truth: peace in the region will never be possible without these two countries sitting down and drawing up a mutual plan on how to move forward without conflict – both physical and verbal. Till then, all we will get is verbose back and forth between angry officials.