India’s former High Commissioner to Pakistan, Ajay Bisaria believes that continuing terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir by Pakistan-backed terror outfits will keep on pushing back any hopes of normalcy in India-Pakistan relations.
Seven unarmed, innocent civilians were gunned down by terrorists in the Ganderbal district of Jammu and Kashmir on Sunday, with the Pakistan-based terror outfit ‘The Resistance Front’ (TRF) claiming responsibility for the terror attack. The attack came only a few days after External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar’s visit to Islamabad for a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) during which he had also exchanged customary greetings with Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar. “That has been the story of India-Pakistan relations. It’s very cyclical. Each time there’s a forward movement, there’s an accident or an act of terrorism. Terrorism is the dealbreaker in this relationship,” Bisaria told IANS on the sidelines of the NDTV World Summit in New Delhi on Tuesday.
The former envoy reckoned that there was “some positivity” attached to EAM’s visit to Pakistan, even though no formal bilateral discussions were held during EAM Jaishankar’s 24-hour stay in Islamabad, last week. “India was sending a strong signal that we want to stabilise the relationship. There were no formal bilateral conversations, but at least there was nothing that was very negative that happened. The hope was that there would be some forward positive movement, but the acts of terrorism that we continue to see in Srinagar always pose a significant threat to this relationship,” he stated. The seasoned diplomat agreed that Pakistan is going through a huge crisis, particularly facing a huge security challenge on its Western border. “It is also facing a huge economic challenge. It’s gone into its 24th IMF programme and the long term economic issues have not been settled. It’s also going through a political churn because the civil-military relationship is also not very good. Imran Khan, the former prime minister, continues to be in jail. So, Pakistan itself is in a fairly unstable phase at this point of time,” Bisaria told IANS in an interview.
Having taken over as India’s High Commissioner to Pakistan in 2017, Bisaria was asked by Islamabad to leave the country in August 2019 after the abrogation of Article 370. He had then served as High Commissioners of India to Canada from March 2020 to June 2022. Ambassador Sanjay Kumar Verma, who took over from Bisaria, was on October 14 withdrawn by New Delhi, along with “other targeted diplomats and officials”, from Canada following Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s continued “hostility” towards India. For Bisaria, the massive deterioration in India-Canada ties comes as a “surprise”. “The Canada relationship, and the turn it took, comes as a surprise.
This is an irony because it’s actually a very strong relationship between India and a Western power, both democracies. The geopolitical interests are aligned because Canada’s Indo-Pacific strategy considers India a critical partner. So I think this is a story of a mishandled and mismanaged security problem that could have been handled much better,” he stated.
The former Ambassador opined that the entire issue should have been handled at the security, and not political level. “When it is handled at the political level, then the decibels become higher and these extreme steps like expelling diplomats have been taken. I hope that better sense prevails and this relationship also stabilises a bit,” he mentioned.
–IANS
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