India-Pak Diplomacy - What The Media Misses

Sanjay Dixit finds it extremely naïve on the part of our big names of journalism to entirely miss the point: Talks between India and Pakistan would have been a big reward to Pakistan.

The charade of Indian media discussing the India-Pakistan engagement in a typically shrill and surcharged manner is nothing new. But the discourse plummeted to such abysmal depths of naïvétè and stupidity that one wondered whether the IQ of our premier journalists has just evaporated! Or if the coverage is driven so much by personal agendas that all sense of perspective has been lost.

Contrast this with reporting in the Pakistan media. They seem to have got a far better measure of Indian diplomacy than the Indians. All their major newspapers highlighted the success of India’s diplomacy after the PM Modi visited UAE and brought off a diplomatic coup with remarkable dexterity. A Pakistani news service carried the headline “Modi steps into the wedge between Pakistan and UAE”. All the Pakistani newspapers carried a balanced account of PM Modi’s new diplomacy of connecting India from the Far East to UAE, and even Iran and Israel. They highlighted his statement made with a steely flourish that India would move on with, without or despite those who don’t care to join in. Nobody could miss the reference. Pakistan media got that and so did Pakistan establishment.

Given this background, I find it extremely naïve on the part of our big names of journalism to entirely miss the point. Talks between India and Pakistan would have been a big reward to Pakistan. India loses nothing if the talks are called off. The US, Afghanistan, Iran, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Central Asia are all tilting against Pakistan and therefore, India has no reason to reward Pakistan with talks at this point.

Ufa was a brilliant gambit by the PM. It could be turned into a success only by someone who had an accurate understanding of how things would pan out after the Ufa declaration. It happened exactly as scripted. Credit for this would go to Jaishankar, not Doval. It’s a brilliant and emphatic diplomatic victory. Jaishankar understood what the reaction would be from the Pakistani Army. He understood that Pakistani Army has all the levers but their understanding of diplomacy is of the sledgehammer variety, not the silken variety.

So what would the Pakistani Army do? Exactly what it did in the last few days. It was such a no-brainer that when we see our experts and journalists shouting themselves hoarse and lamenting the collapse of talks, they fail to realise that India has pushed Pakistan into exactly the place it wanted to. Ask Christine Fair. She has been saying right since the Ufa declaration that talks reward Pakistan and enable them to perpetuate the cycle of terror-talk-terror. No clearer articulation of India’s position has been made in decades in the way it was done by the EAM Sushma Swaraj, who brought home the distinction between talks and dialogue.

So to summarise: India’s push with UAE, USA’s refusal to certify Pakistan’s sincerity in disrupting terror networks in Afghanistan, Afghanistan Vice President’s threat to attack militant shelters across the Durand Line, these are all part of a pattern. Expect Pakistan to come unstuck very soon. Of course, there will be the usual Pakistani response on the LOC and through activation of their terrorist networks. Nothing new there.