26/11 is stuck as a bone in throat  in India- Pakistan relations. The world has changed, but Delhi and Islamabad have not.  Despite  several opportunities  to look beyond the Mumbai terror attacks of November 26-28 , 2008, which have become an albatross  around  neck of the two countries, the two sides  have shut their doors  to   build a special relationship.

The discourse  should have moved forward  during the meetings  of  Home Minister  P. Chidambram and  his Pakistani counterpart  Rehman Malik, when they met  on the sidelines of  SAARC interior ministers conference in Islamabad. There was a grand opportunity to do so .

It is not to suggest that 26/11 should be forgotten or forgiven. No self-respecting nation would do that. India has its own   position at the global level. Forgetting 26/11 would mean  forgiving terrorists  and their sponsors who did that. And, there is not even an iota of doubt about the geographical location  of the origin of the attack nor about the brains that worked on the plot and the hands that  guided the hands of  Ajmal Kasab  and nine others. Terrorists are  terrorists. They cannot be friends to anyone.

Rehman Malik  could be making right kind of noises  to  pander to a constituency. It could also be his compulsion  because he could not have been seen  to concede each and every point that his Indian counterpart was trying to drive home at Pakistani soil. “ We respect our courts. If our Supreme Court has given judgment, we ought to respect it,” Rehman Malik said  in response to a question whether  Hafiz Sayeed , the chief of Jamat-ud-Dawa, whom  India  charges with being the mastermind of the  terror plot of 2008.

Is India  giving a larger than life profile to Hafiz Sayeed, who claims to be  heading a charity organization, running schools where children are fed with food and Islamic education. Jihad is a holy word in this education. Is the jihad against  illiteracy, backwardness  being given  other meanings, which  cause problems for one and all.  Or, is it that  Pakistan is deliberately underplaying the role of  Hafiz Sayeed. If  cases against the Jamat-ud-Dawa chief are failing in court, there can be two reasons; one, he is innocent, the  other could be that charge sheet is so weak that it fails to stand  the  legal scrutiny.

Something, for sure, is wrong somewhere. India and Pakistan have to correct that wrong, and that needs to be done sooner than later.  It is necessary because this kind of tale, where the central theme is  Mumbai and 26/11, would lead them nowhere.  Mumbai has  come out shadows. The hotels where the attackers had wreaked havoc are back in business. Mumbai is moving at its pace, as usual.

It is  for  Muhammad Yiusuf Raza Gilani and Manmohan Singh to find a way out, where terrorists are punished and the national integrity  or prestige of  neither of the two countries is not compromised. The facts of the case are simple: a crime  of unprecedented  magnitude took place in Mumbai, and Pakistan itself is a victim of so many 26/11s. Its attempt to ignore one 26/11 because it happened on the soil of India  is a dangerous thinking. It will have no case against the perpetrators of the terror acts  taking place  in Pakistan, as well. The sharing of intelligence   should be in  genuine spirit, not the way CIA and ISI are working; dodging each other at every step.

For the special relationship that the two nuclear powered neighbours should have, it is necessary that they come  out of shadows of Mumbai by addressing  issue by issue, because the solution of one issue can lead to the resolution of the other. Same can be true in the case of Kashmir.. If Mumbai should not hold  Indo-Pak relations hostage, Kashmir, too should not. Let there be a simultaneous progress.

Beyond the immediate future, however, the intelligence  sharing  formula  is far from reassuring. The security  in both the countries  is deteriorating rapidly, particularly in the mountains along the Afghan border that harbor al-Qaeda and the Taliban. There are more than  visible  signs that those groups were working with indigenous extremists in Pakistan's populous Punjabi heartland.

The Pakistani government was mired in political bickering. The army, still fixated on its historical adversary India, remained ill-equipped and unwilling to throw its full weight into the counterinsurgency fight. In India, the Maoist insurgency is threatening the basic foundation of the democracy; a class war is on and it is further moving upto destablise a system.

In the given situation neither of the countries can afford to remain static  mindset on one or the other issue, because  the opportunities are meant to be grabbed to move forwards.  The lost opportunities may not come back again. As, the scene of 2006-2007  when India and Pakistan were close to  finding a solution of Kashmir crisis,  no longer exist. That is a classic case  the way the things should not have been done. The wait and watch approach do not  pay all the time. The leadership  is meant to take a call and call at an appropriate time, not wait when solutions would land  at their doorsteps.  This is the art of diplomacy and politics.

Chidambaram has returned home, and   after a  little over fortnight  his colleague  S M Krishna would be visiting Pakistan to meet his counterpart  in Islamabad, Shah Mehmood Qureshi. Individual handshakes and the right kind of noises do  make headlines, but they don’t deliver solution to the problems unless, the intentions are translated into action . It has to be both ways. One-way ticket would  promote only the fiction of dialogue, and fictions are devoid of substance of reality.

Moreover, it is not merely the question of the governments alone. It is  the question of destiny of millions of people living in India and Pakistan, who cannot be  made to sit , wait and watch a permanent state of uncertainty. They want to see a move beyond  26/11.  

Lastupdate on : Mon, 28 Jun 2010 21:30:00 Mecca time
Lastupdate on : Mon, 28 Jun 2010 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Tue, 29 Jun 2010 00:00:00 IST