Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh of India could not have chosen the time and place better for sending the very public message to Pakistan. On Thursday when he made the conditional offer for talks with Pakistan from the embattled Kashmir valley, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state was just a few hours into her latest jaunt to the country.
Dr. Singh's message and its circumstance showcased the problems of the sub-continent resulting from Islamabad's past policies of fighting with India an undeclared, asymmetric war on the back of Islamist terrorists. Had this message been delivered in the same fashion with a senior American official on Pakistan's soil before September 11, 2001, it would not have rung with such poignancy across continents.
For those were the days when the realist US considered terrorism as an extension of statecraft, albeit illegitimate. That day in September eight years ago changed the perspective radically. The US has now realized that terrorism is a ductile force that can reach any corner if provided a suitable ideological garb. Pakistan, unfortunately, has ridden the tiger for long that it finds disembarkation extremely fraught with danger.
Dr. Singh, on the contrary, is a fast learner. If he was ready to give Pakistan the benefit of the doubt in the process of the changing political dynamic at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt in July this year, the resultant opprobrium he attracted back home made him choose his words extremely carefully.
He told a public gathering in Kashmir, the longstanding battleground of Indo-Pak confrontation, "We are ready to talk to Pakistan on all issues as we believe in peaceful negotiation of issues; however the terrorists are making this impossible due to their terror activities. Our request to Pakistan is to dismantle the entire terrorist network as this is their responsibility and put an end to this mess." There, the T-word was back in the same sentence offering talks to Pakistan. Singh had delinked the talks from terrorism at the Egyptian resort on the sidelines of the Non Aligned Movement summit.
He had shown there a canny awareness about how Indo-Pak dialogue was hostage to shadowy operators of terrorism who would seek drive a wedge between the two with isolated acts of extreme violence, each time New Delhi and Islamabad sought to bridge the chasm. But perhaps Singh had miscalculated his ability to carry the Indian public opinion on a contentious issue far too soon after the Mumbai mayhem of 26/11.
This time too Singh showed the same awareness in his words that qualified his offer. He said, "Every time when relations start improving between India and Pakistan, terrorists create some major trouble to halt this process. We know that the people in Pakistan are not in favor of violence in India as everybody, both in India and Pakistan want to live in peace and tranquility." The evocation about the people left out an inclusion of the political class of Pakistan.
The political establishment, embellished by the military, had been seeking lately to overtly distance itself from the consequences of terrorism of Pakistan origin by claiming two things; (a) Pakistan itself is a victim of terrorism; (b) the terrorists operating out of Pakistan are non-state actors.
Singh was not willing to give them the leeway they sought by this twin track approach. So he pointed out, "If they are non-state actors, it is the solemn duty of the government of Pakistan to bring them to book, to destroy their camps and to eliminate their infrastructure. The perpetrators of the acts of terror must pay a heavy penalty for their barbaric crimes against humanity."
That kind of set the stage for Hillary Clinton to tell Islamabad that "I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they (al Qaeda leaders) are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to."
But at the end it is only very little that international pressure could do to achieve change in the internal dynamic of a country. It has to be the people of Pakistan who would have to make a choice: of being the favorite whipping boy of the American and the Indian leadership alike or being the nation of Muhammad Ali Jinnah's dream, a modern Muslim nation ready to take on the world in their own right.
Dr. Singh sought to catch the drift of public opinion in the context of Indo-Pakistan relation. He expressed a desire when he said, "I call upon the people and Government of Pakistan to show their sincerity and good faith. As I have said many times before, we will not waste time in responding to their call."
Pakistan's Prime Minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani saw virtue in Dr. Singh's offer for talks. Singh's remarks were an outcome of the meeting between the two premiers at Sharm el-Sheikh in July, when they had agreed that dialogue was the only way to resolve outstanding issues, he said.
"He (Singh) had agreed that there is no other way but dialogue ... We see this positively," Gilani told newsmen in the northwestern city of Peshawar where he had gone to inspect the devastation of a car bomb explosion that had greeted Clinton's visit.
But Gilani too showed that Pakistan could go back to timeworn rhetoric if India could retrace its steps. He talked about no solution being possible without the "core issue" of Kashmir being resolved.
Thus was this drama of statements and counterstatements merely a show put up for the benefit of the American visitors to the sub-continent? That is a question which hangs in the air.