While Pakistan’s leafy Lahore suburb of Jati Umra saw former prime minister Nawaz Sharif play host to select members of the Indian media accompanying Indian foreign minister S Jaishankar’s landmark appearance at the Shanghai Cooperation Council meet, Chinese officials were reported to have met with a Baloch separatist leader in a quiet café in London. Balochi leaders refused to confirm or deny the meeting, with most saying it had no sanction.
This took place days after a Baloch suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into a convoy that killed three Chinese officials just outside Karachi International airport—a clear bid to derail the SCO meet. Chinese employees working on various projects on the Belt and Road Initiative and the China Pakistan Economic Corridor have also recently become the target of Baloch separatist ire. An increasingly concerned China—looking at ways to ensure its grand plan to connect the Central Asia states to the Arabian Sea through the key Pakistani port of Gwadar moves forward—has now offered to put boots on the ground and send its own security personnel to Pakistan.
The growing Chinese presence in Pakistan is poised to take on an even larger footprint. That factor alone must spur India, facing down the People’s Liberation Army on its Northeastern border, into taking a fresh look at ties with its western neighbour.
Our equation with Pakistan has been on ice since India’s cross-border attack in February 2019 on a Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist training camp in Balakot as retaliation for an attack on a CRPF convoy in Pulwama. Trade between India and Pakistan had been suspended after the Pulwama attack as well, with India imposing heavy duties on goods from Pakistan.
The Balakot strike helped Prime Minister Narendra Modi sweep the elections at home. But bilateral relations plummeted after the war of words that followed. There were visceral verbal attacks on Modi by former prime minister Imran Khan, who also rejected then Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa’s attempts to reopen trade ties after the J&K bifurcation. This culminated in the expulsion of the high commissioners of both nations.
Although the 2021 truce signed by the two countries held up until the run-up to parliamentary polls in J&K, a series of terror attacks in Jammu resurrected the spectre of the blood and gore of old. The only difference was that it was concentrated in Hindu majority Jammu, not Army-centric Kashmir.
Which brings us to the curious lack of comment on the terror-free election campaign for the J&K assembly polls that recently concluded. Was Pakistan’s Army unable to draw on its dwindling resources to derail the polls due to the multiple suicide attacks by the Baloch Liberation Army and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Taliban on its outposts in the western border?
Insiders say the nation’s Army was under pressure from Washington to hold off after the Jammu spiral. This could also be seen as a quiet signal to Delhi that the civilian-military establishment is rethinking the trade impasse that sent Pakistan’s economy into a spiral.
As Pakistan’s foremost proponent of peace with India, Nawaz Sharif’s call for reopening trade was a plea for good sense to prevail. “Maybe my thinking is different from others, but I believe we are a potential market for each other. Why should Indian and Pakistani farmers and manufacturers go outside to sell their products?” he told Indian journalists from the plush offices of daughter Maryam Nawaz, the chief minister of Punjab. “Goods now go from Amritsar to Lahore via Dubai—what are we doing, who is benefitting from this? What should take two hours now takes two weeks.”
The elder Sharif refused to be drawn into treacherous ground on addressing the current impasse over Kashmir. It is a matter he wisely chose to circle away from in the past when he reached out to then Indian prime minister I K Gujral in the Maldives on the sidelines of a South Asia summit. He did the same with former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who pulled off the historic Lahore visit aboard the maiden bus service between the two countries in 1999 that highlighted the prospect of peace.
But the question that engages the power trinity in Lahore today—Nawaz Sharif, the elder statesman; deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar; and Army Chief General Asim Munir—is, can there be a meeting of minds on Kashmir that allows Pakistan to move forward on trade and tourism, industry, and investment, creating a synergy on partnering in fields like IT and biotechnology? The sliver of optimism in the Pakistan pro-peace clique saw Ishaq Dar have an animated conversation with Jaishankar at a formal lunch.
India’s abrogation of Article 370 is irrevocable as upheld by the Supreme Court in August 2023. But the apex court seemed open to an application by the Union territory regarding the restoration of its statehood. In fact, the new J&K Cabinet led by Chief Minister Omar Abdullah passed a resolution calling on the Union government to restore the region’s statehood. Abdullah is to meet the PM sometime soon regarding the matter. The region seems to finally be moving towards continued peace.
Jaishankar’s Pakistan visit, talked up as the first by any Indian foreign minister to the nation since 2015, amplified India’s commitment to SCO. Jaishankar’s reiteration of the ‘good neighbours do not indulge in terror’ is par for the course.
But living up to pre-summit speculation, Nawaz did not pass up the opportunity to bring up the reopening of the peace track, pitching for an India-Pakistan final in the Champions Trophy on Indian soil, saying he was willing to travel to India and watch the cricket game. The embattled General Asim Munir, tackling an unprecedented challenge from separatists within, knows that a hot border in the east and the west makes peace with India an imperative.
Bats over bullets; is this an ageing Nawaz Sharif’s last and final shy at peace? And for the first time, this has happened with an army chief who will not do a Kargil as his bete noire president General Pervez Musharraf did.
(Views are personal)
Neena Gopal
Foreign policy analyst