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HomeOpinionLetter From PakistanBilawal's India visit is Pakistan's royal coronation moment. It's equally fruitless

Bilawal’s India visit is Pakistan’s royal coronation moment. It’s equally fruitless

Pakistanis trying to find the fruits of Bilawal Bhutto’s successful India visit will still be looking for that IMF bailout, deciding between expensive bhindi and daal.

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Ghulam Ali’s Hungama hai kion barpa is one way of re-counting the India versus Pakistan saga of the last weekend. All fight and no talk “with each other” being the order of the day. While revelling in the home-grown courtroom drama for the last several weeks, we Pakistanis never had to worry about what happens across our border. Taking a day off the judicial soap and coming back to nowhere with more hungama or ruckus.

Over the last one week, we were warned that foreign minister of Pakistan, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, is not going to India but to Goa, which only happens to be in India. Got it. And he is attending the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit and Shanghai is in China. It was enough geography lessons for the whole year. Don’t get your hopes high, was the signalling. Now, did Zardari return from India or Goa? It’s a question we hope to find an answer to when the prime minister of Pakistan attends the SCO summit in New Delhi, which only happens to be in India.

Lucky for us that along with “highly placed sources” we now have the self-proclaimed experts on body language and gesture reading. If the biggest scoop was that the “sources saw handshake” between foreign ministers of India and Pakistan, both S. Jaishankar and Zardari seated on the same dinner table was definitely devastating news for those of us who thought our ministers would be ordering room service in their fancy Goa hotel.

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leader Shireen Mazari shared her immense knowledge that Zardari doing namaste to his Indian counterpart was appeasement. And she for some reason also knew that Jaishankar wasn’t interested in a handshake. By that explanation, all SCO foreign ministers were doing namaste and appeasing India. Not far behind was Former Minister of Information and Broadcasting of Pakistan Fawad Chaudhry condemning that the visit signifies government’s love for Modi. Former prime minister Imran Khan calls foreign minister bewaqoof (fool) for he went to India. He’s also citing Quranic verses to criticise Jaishankar’s arrogance, it is the same foreign minister whose statements on purchasing oil from Russia, Khan was playing in his jalsas (rallies).


Also read: Bilawal at SCO meet impressed Rawalpindi. He can replace Imran Khan and stand up to India


Great messes of decades

Ironically, for a visit with promised zero expectations or movement on the bilateral front, everyone has been invested in it like the coronation of King Charles III. You will find the supporters going gaga as if their leader Zardari has won them the proverbial cricket world cup. You will find tajziakars (analysts) who were predicting an Indian attack on Pakistan very soon and wanted the foreign minister to skip the SCO meet are now basking in the glory of a “successful India visit.” You will also find the opposition accusing Zardari of bringing shame to the country after the Indian foreign minister labelled him a “promoter, justifier and spokesperson of terrorism.”

The term ‘cross-border terrorism’ has stuck around for decades in every bilateral and multilateral meeting involving India and Pakistan. When asked why the Agra Summit 2001 failed, India’s then Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj in a memorable interview on Pakistan Television had said: “when you [Musharraf] want to mention Kashmir as ‘core issue’ and want no mention of ‘cross-border terrorism’ in the agreed statement then it won’t work.” Now 22 years later, all Pakistan gets is a mention of ‘cross-border terrorism’ while it is reminded that the ‘core issue’ is a thing of the past. Jaishankar said at the presser, “they have nothing to do with Kashmir. They should talk about when they will vacate the illegally occupied territories of Jammu and Kashmir.”

If history is our teacher, those who have tried to forge their own path with India have been reprimanded like former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Pakistan’s India policy or for that matter its entire foreign policy has civilian politicians as its face but they neither make it nor do they have any sway over it. After all, the great messes of waging jihad in Kashmir via proxies such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) or Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and the debacle of the strategic depth in Afghanistan now blowing is the brainchild of Pakistan’s military leaders over decades.

Even today, those who have the power to make-or-break diplomatic ties are actually talking to India behind the scenes. They have been doing it since 2019 with reported mediation of Arab countries. As explained by Pakistan’s former foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi in 2021, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief’s regular meetings with his Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) counterpart wasn’t formal negotiation, “I won’t call it formal back channel but India-Pakistan are discussing situation with each other from time to time.”

Before it all began, the conspiracy hawks were warning how “Kashmir was sold” by the former army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa. He was apparently going around convincing people in Pakistan that friendship with India was imperative. “Humare tanks mein petrol nahin. We don’t have petrol in our tanks to fight India,” he had told a group of journalists. He indicated that Pakistan’s financial woes are such that having a good relationship with India now is crucial.

While the big boys play the real talk-talk game, the politicians do what they have to do—score points with jingoistic rhetoric on India and try to sell the Kashmir chooran. They try to win accolades on “Kaise Kashmir ka muqadma paish kya (How the Kashmir case was presented),” the muqadma that every Pakistani leader for decades has pleaded for at the United Nations, to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Did it help free Kashmir? Threatening India on holding G20 meeting in Kashmir with “waqt anay pe aisa jawab dege ki yaad rahega (When the time comes we will respond in a way that they always remember it” is simply juvenile. Also, the notion that all G20 attendees won’t show up is laughable, as one G20 brotherly country Saudi Arabia is scouting for investment in Kashmir. While Dubai’s Emaar Group is investing $60 million to build shopping and office complex in Srinagar.

Today, Saudi Arabia mends its relationship with Iran, Israel reaches out to Saudi Arabia over direct hajj flights. But India and Pakistan can’t talk, can’t reopen trade that will aid common Pakistanis. Here it is easier to smear your political opponents with labels like Modi ka yaar, ghaddar ( Modi’s friend, unfaithful) or in pressers call “Modi butcher of Gujarat”. For now, try to find the fruits of Zardari’s successful visit to India. For when the new sun dawns, Pakistan will still be looking for that IMF bailout and we will be deciding between expensive bhindis or daal (ladyfingers or pulses).

The author is a freelance journalist from Pakistan. Her Twitter handle is @nailainayat. Views are personal.

(Edited by Ratan Priya)

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