Down-sizing a summit?

THE WILD FLUCTUATIONS of the diplomatic mood in both India and Pakistan about the prospects of a constructive meeting between their leaders in New York later this month seem to suggest a disturbing trend on the bilateral front. Neither the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, nor Pakistan's President and Chief Executive, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has resiled from their willingness to hold talks for the second time in two months. However, New Delhi has already begun showing signs of some unwarranted nervousness, if not also plain diffidence, in having to re-engage Pakistan in the present circumstances. Surprisingly, the Vajpayee administration can scarcely conceal its apprehension that Gen. Musharraf may now seek to define a context for the New York talks in much the same manner as he presumably crafted the diplomatic setting of the Agra summit last July. A matter of unseemly eloquence by official India is its latest apprehension that Pakistan is actually plotting to enact a ``re-run'' of the Agra summit during the prospective bilateral parleys on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly session in New York. In a sense, New Delhi may have allowed itself to be perturbed at this juncture by the series of statements that Gen. Musharraf has been making so as to keep the Agra `process' to his advantage. Now, there is really nothing new in Islamabad's emphatic insistence that a mutually acceptable resolution of the Kashmir dispute is central to the normalisation of the India-Pakistan relationship. Yet, if New Delhi seems worried, the changing impulses of Pakistan are no less a factor at work.

Some weighted words and deeds of Pakistan in the aftermath of the Agra summit have raised issues of credibility. Two of Mr. Vajpayee's statements, both made in the Parliament of India's vibrant democratic polity, have been contested by Islamabad in the public domain. First, Islamabad maintained that no discussion took place at Agra on the present disposition or the future status of an area that Pakistan ceded to China in the 1960s without consulting India despite its political-diplomatic stake there. Second, the Musharraf administration does not endorse Mr. Vajpayee's reading that Pakistan has undertaken to refrain from raising the Kashmir issue in multilateral fora. As if to underline this dissenting note, Pakistan's Foreign Minister, Mr. Abdul Sattar, made a conspicuous reference to Kashmir, albeit incongruously, at the ongoing World Conference against Racism in Durban. In its reaction, New Delhi first did some loud thinking about the futility of any further conversations with Gen. Musharraf in such presumptively outrageous circumstances. However, if New Delhi has not decided to call off the meeting to be held in New York, Mr. Vajpayee deserves credit for remaining true to his recent assertions of faith in a sustained dialogue with Pakistan.

While Gen. Musharraf too has been blowing hot and cold about the objective purposes of talking to New Delhi, the immediate course of the bilateral dialogue may be determined by the credibility of each side. Both countries should, therefore, recognise the dangers of allowing their respective hawks on the domestic scene to outline the direction of what must be an inter-state dialogue that calls for uncommon statesmanship. The Kashmir dispute as also Pakistan-inspired terrorism inside India, besides their concerns about each other's nuclear and conventional military postures, can brook no other approach.

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Section  : Opinion
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