Last time a Pakistani foreign minister visited India, Dr Manmohan Singh was still India’s Prime Minister. Rawalpindi’s stamp of governance was with Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani in Islamabad’s corridors of power. India’s Jammu and Kashmir had its special status with Article 370 well placed into India’s constitution, and New Delhi was yet to see its meteoric rise as subcontinent’s diplomatic capital.
What remained constant since 2011 is Pakistan’s use of so-called “non-state actors” and what New Delhi has often called out as cross-border sponsoring of terrorism akin to Islamabad’s state policy.
On Friday, as Pakistani foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari appeared with an on-stage stumble against his Indian counterpart, the two leaders’ sharp diplomatic optics concluded the core SCO goal: combating terrorism.
“Combating terrorism is a core SCO goal. We must not allow anybody, individuals or states, to hide behind the non-state actors,” India’s foreign minister Dr S. Jaishankar told reporters later.
In a stringent reposte to his Pakistani counterpart’s remarks earlier in the day, Jaishankar called Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari a “promoter, justifier and spokesperson of a terrorism industry which is the mainstay of Pakistan.”
“The references to ‘weaponising terrorism’ for scoring diplomatic points was a point which will not wash well with the [Indian] interlocutors given Pakistan’s role as the epicenter of terrorism,” Anil Wadhwa, a former Indian ambassador and Executive Council member of New Delhi-based Global Counter Terrorism Council, told WION.
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With an obvious India-Pakistan showdown in Goa, the bleak expectations of such multilateral stumbles turning into bilateral breakthroughs between New Delhi and Islamabad have died down yet again.
“Bilawal’s speech had several veiled and unjustified digs at India on chest-thumping, terrorism, fascism, and acting contrary to UNSC, among other issues,” Rajiv Bhatia, Distinguished Fellow at Mumbai-based think tank Gateway House and a former Indian ambassador, told WION.
“It will be unrealistic to build any hopes about improvement in the short term in India-Pakistan relations. A big gulf of distrust divides the two largest nations in South Asia,” Bhatia added.
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