Transcript
India-Pakistan podcast with Christine Fair and Sameer Patil
Moderated by Manjeet Kripalani
Manjeet Kripalani (MK): This is Manjeet Kripalani from Gateway House following up on the meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation today. With me is Christine Fair who is a visiting fellow at Gateway House for the summer and an expert on terrorism in Pakistan, and Sameer Patil, our national security fellow at Gateway House. I’m going to take an opinion from the both of you on how you view the meeting and the five steps of the joint statement that have been made by the foreign secretaries of the two countries. Let’s start with you Christine.
Christine Fair (CCF): We’ve seen it before and it goes nowhere. I thought the coverage of it was really quite charming but we’ve seen this every time. The Pakistanis are very good at saying all sorts of things that are very palliated. But the fact is that Nawaz Sharif doesn’t control any of these issues. In fact, from my point of view, as someone who watches this, this meeting really sets up the current government for a lot of vulnerabilities. The very first terror attack that happens after this meeting, this government is going to look pretty foolish. From the Pakistani side, anything that happens in India that promotes this particular government to respond defensively, is going to make Nawaz Sharif look particularly vulnerable which is exactly what the (Pakistani) army is constantly doing. They are constantly looking for opportunities to undermine Nawaz Sharif. I thought the claim made by M. J. Akbar that it was an incredible victory that Pakistan finally accepted India’s definition of terror, to be particularly amusing because we know that Pakistan has a history of making all sorts of claims in public and retrenching from it (at) every possible opportunity. So being a cynic, and having watched this fish swim around the gold fish pond a few times, I don’t think this is going to be any different from any of the numerous other proclamations of a similar nature.
MK: … and Sameer?
Sameer Patil (SP): I completely agree with Christine, but let’s take a step-by-step approach on what they have decided. First is a meeting in New Delhi between the two NSAs to discuss all issues connected to terrorism. Now, the fundamental problem is – how to define terrorism? The definition that Pakistan has and the definition that India has are completely different.
MK: But they’ve agreed on a definition. And they’ve agreed that it’s going to be the Indian one.
SP: Yes, but the significant term here is just ‘terrorism’. It’s not ‘cross-border terrorism’ or ‘terrorism in India’. So that also gives Pakistan a forum to raise all the allegations that it has been raising recently about India being involved in all these activities in Pakistan – in Baluchistan as well as some other …
CCF: … which technically is not terrorism. Because those Baluch are primarily targeting national security forces. Which is technically insurgency.
In the Pakistani spirit of splitting hairs until there are no hairs left to split, let’s just keep splitting them…
SP: Second – early meeting of the director generals of BSF and DG Pakistan Rangers followed by that of the DGMOs. Now this has been tried before. The meetings took place in 2013 and they were followed by a series of, what should I say, escalating incidents on the border. So we’ll have to really see what it achieves.
MK: Let’s go back to the NSAs – the meeting of the NSAs of both countries due to meet in New Delhi to discuss, again, those terrorism-related issues. Sameer, is this a real meeting? Or…?
SP: Well we hope that the meeting happens and we hope there is no terrorist incident before that which will force the government to call off that meeting.
MK: So in short, it could be a joke.
SP: It could be a joke. And another joke is that really we had a joint working group on terrorism which was established some time in late 2000 to discuss precisely these sort of issues and that never really took off because there was a lot of opposition coming from the security establishments itself. So we’ll have to see.
MK: Okay. Christine, what do you think the NSAs meeting in New Delhi is going to be?
CCF: It is a joke. Here is my issue as an outsider looking at this engagement. India basically patronises this notion of false equivalency. That both India and Pakistan are equally culpable for the security situation that obtains (prevails) and that’s just simply not true. Pakistan is the revisionist state, Pakistan supports terrorism, India is largely a victim. So I’m not sure why India would put itself out on a platform that equalises its position relative to Pakistan. From my point of view, if I were India, I wouldn’t have these meetings because the fact of the matter is the national security advisor of Pakistan well knows that terrorism remains a tool of Pakistani foreign policy. Moreover, these kinds of meetings feed into Pakistan’s domestic process of “look…India’s now…we are agreeing to (on) terrorism” and they are going to use this domestically to talk about the issues that Sameer noted. So from my point of view, I just think it’s about politics – to engage with a partner on these terms that makes it look as if India and Pakistan are equal contributors to the insecurity when it’s simply not the case. The onus, as this government has said repeatedly, is on Pakistan. This undermines, in my view, all of those statements.
MK: So the Indian media and the BJP spokesperson has called this a ‘breakthrough’. But it seems that every meeting they have is a breakthrough. How can this be true?
SP: Because the media, in a sense, always goes overboard when there is any India-Pakistan meeting and obviously, hopefully, if Prime Minister Modi travels to Pakistan next year, you will see the culmination of it. But really, you know, it again goes back to that basic thing about if there is any terrorist attack, all this is going to fall down.
MK: It all falls down. So Christine, we are all going to fall down, or we’re going to hold up, or the peaceniks are going to be happy. I mean, are the peaceniks going to get a chance to rejoice or…?
CCF: I think this is the ‘mombatti melting ka moment’.
SP: I agree with that.
MK: Very well. This is the ‘India-Pakistan melting mombatti moment’. No chance for peace.
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