The foreign ministers of India and Pakistan are slated to meet on the sidelines of the UN general assembly meeting in New York in September. It will be preceded by a meeting between the foreign secretaries of the two countries. But neither meeting can be expected to yield anything positive. Many Indians will be hoping and praying that taking a cue from the fiasco at the NAM summit at Sharm el-Shaikh, where Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had allowed Pakistan to link India with unrest in Balochistan, the external affairs minister, S. M. Krishna, will be smart enough to save himself from falling into another trap when he meets his Pakistani counterpart in New York.
It is said in defence of Manmohan Singh that he does not think the Balochistan reference was a faux pas as India has nothing to hide, unlike Pakistan. Indians may think that Pakistan has no ‘solid’ proof of India’s active involvement in Balochistan, but it will manufacture something that has the tacit backing of the US. Some American leaders and ‘experts’ have always been supportive of any wild allegation that Islamabad may choose to hurl at India.
America is again swearing eternal friendship to Pakistan. Influential US politicians and think tank scholars have converted praise for Pakistan into a standard ritual. As a result Pakistanis of all hues—so-called peaceniks, intellectuals, strategists and politicians, all of whom suffer from paranoia about India, are now becoming almost hysterical.
They want the Americans to quickly give them something like the Indo-US civil nuclear deal. Islamabad can hardly wait to have its own nuclear submarine since India has already made one indigenously to ‘threaten’ South Asia! No delay can be brooked in either case because India is ready to devour Pakistan, a country that has been telling its people from 1947 that India is no match for it militarily or even financially.
The nightmare for the Pakistanis gets worse by the day because they think India’s defence preparedness is Pak-centric. Every Pakistani is convinced that India faces no danger from Pakistan’s all-weather friend, China. That is hardly surprising. Given the amnesia that overtakes them frequently when dealing with India, the Pakistanis have chosen to be unaware of the troubled history between India and China going back to the 1962 Chinese invasion of India.
In recent days, hospitable Indian newspaper columns given to Pakistanis have dwelt on India’s alleged history of meddling in Pakistani affairs, particularly Balochistan. The learned Pakistani scholars have painted a horrible security scenario for their country because of a multilateral nexus—India, Iran, Israel, Russia and US. UK is a surprise omission.
Quite apart from the absurdity of such theories these Pakistani ‘scholars’ and ‘experts’ have not been able to site a single ‘concrete’ evidence to prove their outlandish theories of ‘conspiracies’ being hatched against their country, especially to disturb Balochistan. Many Baloch leaders have emphatically debunked the Pakistani officials’ claims that they were being backed by India or any other foreign country.
For a country that maintains a heavily oversized and armed military but sees acquisition of even an extra gun by India as a plot to ‘destabilise’ it, it is ridiculous to claim that India’s attempts to modernise its defence forces pose a threat to Pakistan. Criticism of defence expenditure by India is a perennial refrain in Pakistan when the fact is that in terms of GDP Pakistan spends much more on defence than India. In addition Pakistan also receives massive US defence assistance—more than the total of military assistance provided by the US to all the countries!
China’s ‘official’ defence expenditure is said to be around $40 billion a year. But the actual budget is widely believed to be many times more —estimates vary from $70 billion to $200 billion. In recent months, China has started to mouth its more aggressive designs on India—maybe in consonance with Pakistan which is in no mood to settle with India for anything less than Kashmir. A section of Chinese establishment talks about ‘breaking’ India into 30 parts or something. Undoubtedly, some of these ‘broken’ portions will be handed over to the Pakistanis just as they had handed over a part of Kashmir to China during the Bhutto era.
Pakistan’s alleged ‘peace’ offer to India has many ‘hidden’ caveats. Apart from Kashmir, it has prepared a list of ‘issues’ that it wants sorted out with India in its favour as a price for ‘peace’ with India. Let no one in India be fooled. Pakistan is already revving up the Indus water issue while its military as well civilian leaders have made it very clear that they have no intention of dismantling the jihadi-terror network that operates from the Pakistani territories against India.
The Pakistanis will only get ‘bolder’ as they find that their roguish behaviour, be it in regard to nuclear proliferation or terror, goes unpunished or un-reprimanded. Only the most naïve in India will see any good coming out of resumed ‘dialogue’ with Pakistan in New York or any other place on this planet.
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