A good augury

The good news is that hotline contact has been established between Directors of Military Operations of Indian and Pakistani armies to discuss ways and means to reduce tension along the Line of Control (LoC) and the international border. There is hope that innocent civilians on both sides will suffer less – for now at least. It is doubtful however, if there is a lasting solution to this unfortunate autumn ‘exercise’ that, with few exceptional years, is an annual visitation with monotonous continuity. This fire cover is timed by Pakistan to push Kashmiri and foreign infiltrators into the Kashmir Valley. The Indian forces have killed 18 militants.

There is a greater urgency for Pakistan this year as the United States-led forces quit from neighbouring Afghanistan. Islamabad appears keen to ‘secure’ its eastern front with India before getting active on the western one, to be able to help the Afghan Taliban in their bid to somehow return to Kabul. Ironically, this is being done even as a military operation is on to fight the Pakistani Taliban and their foreign partners in Pakistan’s own tribal belt in North Waziristan.

There seems urgency on the Indian side, too. A pro-active Narendra Modi Government is giving it back, mortar-for-mortar and bullet-for-bullet. The previous governments, too, did this. But the new government is making no bones about it. It has virtually ignored the appeal by the UN Secretary General, even as President Pranab Mukherjee, on a trip to Norway, has indicated his views on India’s ‘imported’ militancy, pointing obliquely to the quarters it comes from.
Sensing India’s tough response, Islamabad has appealed to the UN for intervention, insisting that the UN has an ‘important’ role to enforce past resolutions on Kashmir. The world body, all too aware of the past – the resolutions require Pakistan to vacate the territory it wrested during 1947-48 – and the present – of Pakistan’s active help to promote militancy, not just in Kashmir but the entire region – has chosen not to make any new response to the written appeal by Sartaj Aziz, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s foreign affairs advisor.

Pakistan has blamed the Indian response to the ongoing election campaign in Maharashtra and Haryana. By the same token, it must be stressed that Sharif wants to keep the Kashmiri pot boiling to divert attention from the Imran Khan-led opposition protestors who have laid a siege of Islamabad’s high security zone for two months now.

Peace on the border is desirable and should be actively sought. But the geopolitical compulsions prevent India from offering the proverbial other cheek. The two premiers did not meet in New York last month and an early resolution at the diplomatic level seems unlikely. Will Norway’s capital be the meeting point for the two PMs while attending the Nobel award ceremony in December for the joint winners of the Peace Nobel: India’s Kailash Satyarthi and Pakistan’s Malala Yousufzai?