BY PRAFUL BIDWAI

BOTH India and Pakistan damaged their image with their Foreign Ministers’ meeting last week–the first ministerial since the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks–by refusing to start a productive dialogue. This has disappointed many of their citizens who had hoped for better relations.

Pakistan Foreign Minister, Mr Shah Mahmood Qureshi was more blunt and abrasive than India’s Mr S M Krishna. Mr Qureshi undiplomatically said the Indian Minister hadn’t come to Islamabad with a full mandate. Yet, this wasn’t the cause of the talks’ failure, but its effect.

Failure of Talks

The talks failed because India and Pakistan couldn’t agree on the bilateral agenda and a time-table for discussing issues of mutual concern. This failure is large even by the standards of the volatile and often tense India-Pakistan relationship. Indian Home Secretary, Mr G Pillai set the stage for the breakdown by alleging in a media interaction that Indian interrogators had obtained irrefutable evidence from David Coleman Headley, a Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) operative detained in the US, that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency had plotted the Mumbai attacks.

The interrogation happened in June. India’s Home Minister, Mr P Chidambaram met his counterpart Mr Rahman Malik in Pakistan three weeks ago, and returned assured that Mr Malik "understood the situation and agreed that we should address [it] with the seriousness it deserves". The issue was also discussed between the two nations’ Foreign Secretaries.

Mr Pillai’s remarks couldn’t have been more ill-timed. Mr Krishna also didn’t help matters by announcing in Islamabad: "I am here to see what action Pakistan has taken so far" on Headley’s confessions. It’s ludicrous to take the confessions of a terrorist collaborator as clinching evidence.

Underlying such remarks was India’s preoccupation with getting Pakistan to crack down on terrorist groups like LeT. True, no Indian government can ignore the trauma of the Mumbai attacks. This concern is understandable, but not to the point of virtually excluding all other issues and risking the talks’ failure. That’s exactly what happened.

India didn’t accommodate Pakistan’s legitimate concerns, including talks about Kashmir and Siachen, non-interference in Balochistan, and improved cooperation within the Indus Water Treaty framework. All India offered to discuss–besides action against jehadi terrorists–is trade and confidence-building measures. These issues are unarguably pertinent. But it’s futile to expect Pakistan to shelve its own concerns and preoccupations.

Nor did India agree with Pakistan’s proposed schedule for Secretary- and Minister-level meetings. India was apprehensive that Pakistan would use the timelines to try to resume the "composite dialogue" –as if Mumbai hadn’t happened.

In the end, the timelines clashed. Pakistan wanted all outstanding issues addressed in a time-bound manner. India felt the terror issue must first be comprehensively addressed "to inject a degree of normality into the situation", as Indian officials put it. There was no agreement.

Lessons for India

Some sharp exchanges between Indian and Pakistani leaders were further distorted by the media. An Indian paper alleged that Mr Qureshi had called Mr Pillai a "clone" of LeT leader Hafiz Mohammed Saeed. In reality, Mr Qureshi only said that Mr Pillai’s remarks had come up during the talks and Mr Krishna agreed that they were unhelpful. However, both sides put a positive spin on the outcome. Mr Krishna even said "I am quite satisfied."

Both India and Pakistan must draw some lessons from this episode. The greater lesson for India isn’t that engagement with Pakistan is futile, but that it should be wholehearted and cover all outstanding issues.

Secondly, rigidity on the terrorism question is counter-productive. India must recognise that a civilian Pakistani government that’s considered weak vis-à-vis India will be vulnerable to extremists. This would be especially unfortunate just when the Pakistan public is outraged at attack on the Data Darbar shrine, which underscored the Taliban’s hostility to Sufism and its rejection of all folk-Islamic traditions.

India must not over-react to Mr Qureshi’s behaviour and put form and optics before substance. It has extremely high stakes in good relations with Pakistan and must press its concerns. Results from the dialogue won’t be instant. But in the absence of a dialogue, negative outcomes are guaranteed.

Lessons for Pakistan

The lessons for Pakistan are also important. Islamabad cannot claim to be a responsible state when it hunts with the Americans while running with the extremists.

The jehadis have used support from Pakistan’s covert agencies to create independent power centres. Pakistan will pay for their depredations with innocent blood. It’s in Pakistan’s interest to put terrorism on the bilateral agenda–but without being seen to be caving in.

Second, the only way in which Pakistan’s civilian government can consolidate itself is to loosen the military’s hold on power by reining in the ISI. So Mr Qureshi is probably making a mistake in pushing an agenda that could endear him to the Army and help his political career. Mr Qureshi has Prime Ministerial ambitions. But using the Army’s help to fulfil them would be disastrous. That course, as many Pakistani politicians have discovered, is self-defeating.

Third, no matter how hard Pakistan tries, it cannot deny India a role in Afghanistan while using that country to gain "strategic depth". India has not only had historically important trade and cultural links with Afghanistan.

India also enjoys a huge amount of goodwill in Afghanistan because of its well-targeted $1.75 billion aid programme. This is far better tailored to Afghan needs than Western assistance programmes, which are typically routed through tiers of outsourcing agencies and middlemen.

It makes eminent sense for Pakistan and India to get into a non-adversarial relationship in Afghanistan instead of stalking each other. They should explore cooperation.

There’s no alternative to a dialogue that consolidates and puts real content into the notion of peaceful coexistence and mutually beneficial relations. These alone can free the two nations’ peoples from the burden of rivalry and allow them to realise the objective of equitable development with human dignity and rights for all.

In the coming weeks, Indian and Pakistani leaders must engage in introspection and find productive ways of mutually engaging one another.