Something is definitely wrong with the Indian Foreign Policy. It is in a habit of crying over spilt milk.  It has made an issue of the Hurriyat Conference leaders of Kashmir meeting with gorgeous Foreign Minister of Pakistan  Hina Rabbani Khar.  True, the leaders or others from Kashmir who met, are technically citizens of India, because all of them are the Indian passport holders and they have traveled abroad at one point or the other. Barring Shabir Shah, all the other rebels or those claiming to be “representing aspirations of the people of Kashmir,” have  been  meeting with the  Indian leaders or the men of the Indian establishment.  They have also been meeting Pakistani leadership and establishment. The observers  of the two countries know the meaning  of the establishment that work on either side of the border. And, the Hurriyat leaders know it better than anyone else. 
Indian   External Affairs Minister S M Krishna  would have been justified in raising the issue of  meeting  of the Hurriyat leaders   with his Pakistani counterpart, had it been the first meeting of these leaders with the visiting Pakistani  dignitaries.  Krishna can be  exempted. Diplomacy is an art of  men  with vision and the knowledge of the world affairs and  that of their own country. And the Indian foreign policy  is direction less, this is to put the things mildly. 
Talking tough or talking absent-mindedly is not the diplomacy. There should have been wider objectives at stake while dealing with Pakistan. Either you lead or you befriend neighbours. Wars are option of 20th century, and both Delhi and Islamabad know it very well that it has not resolved the matter. 
I am not sure how much knowledge Ms. Khar had about  Kashmir but her  demenaour and brief talk  showed that she was better informed about the affair in Kashmir than her hosts. The tragedy of the Indian foreign policy experts is that their knowledge is confined to the inputs that they gather through officials. They have no cell to monitor the developments and  study implications of the internal developments at the international level, leave alone Kashmir. 
Hadn’t foreign policy expert known that the  Hurriyat leaders  would rush to Delhi to meet Hinna Rabbani Khar. If they had, they could have gone an extra mile and invited them over a cup of tea  and had  separatists declined, their meeting with Ms Khar in itself would have been criticized both back home and  in rest of the country. The Indian Ministry of External Affairs, MEA, would have  pre-empted many things. But that, perhaps, is not the forte of the MEA. 
Leave alone, separatists for a moment, what was the harm in talking to the  Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, whose knowledge about his state and the foreign affairs  is admired even by his critics, PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti, or for that matter  PCC chief Saif-ud-Din Soz, the leader who had  made a breakthrough in 2005 and 2006 in arranging the talks between separatists and the  Central leadership, including Prime Minister. All these leaders are Kashmiris, and whatever point of view they have, is  frankly speaking more realistic. And if the counter argument is that MEA  was knowing everything about Kashmir and the  view point of  Omar, Soz and Mehbooba, then what they did and the way they reacted  on Hurriyat-Khar meeting, showed that  their knowledge was superficial. 
Now a little bit of history, may be MEA overlooked these pages of history. 
At the height of the  Indo-Pak tensions, when the militancy was at its peak, and Kargil was still fresh in the minds of the people of the country, then President of Pakistan and military dictator Pervez Musharraf was invited to India. Before he  flew to Agra,  the city of Taj Mahal, for the talks with the then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee,  he held meeting with the Hurriyat leadership. Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who later became the bitterest critic  of Musharraf, had hailed him as hero of Pakistan and the great sympathizer of Kashmir. Eyebrows were raised and the political rhetoric   was used as a reaction, but the talks were still held, though those failed. All that happened in July 2001,  when the BJP-led National  Democratic Alliance  was in power at the Centre. The government had Omar Abdullah as its minister of state for external affairs. 
Four years later,   the Hurriyat leadership and JKLF chairman Yasin Malik, were  allowed to visit Pakistan Administered  Kashmir. Again Shabir Shah didn’t go for he wanted his nationality to be written as “ Kashmiri” on the passport, and Geelani  declined to visit because  he saw no  usefulness in the visit. Those who visited  not only visited Pakistan administered Kashmir  but also Pakistan. They were treated as VVIPs,  flown in special choppers and when they returned they were overloaded with gifts. The government of India did not raise objections. Earlier, that year Musharraf had again met  these leaders in New Delhi. 
Omar Abdullah and  PDP president Mehbooba Mufti also met the Pakistani leaders when they visited Pakistan. There was an outcry in some sections  of Pakistan that how come the mainstream leaders have been allowed to touch Pakistani soil. But the matters drowned  after a while. 
The July 26 episode, too, would be forgotten. But the MEA needs to learn lessons from it. There are doubts.

Lastupdate on : Mon, 1 Aug 2011 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Mon, 1 Aug 2011 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Tue, 2 Aug 2011 00:00:00 IST