Rajeev Sharma

By : Rajeev Sharma

For six and a half decades, Pakistan has been ahead of India in playing mind games and coming up with out-of-the-box diplomatic and political initiatives. But since Narendra Modi became the Indian prime minister 19 months ago, there has been a complete role reversal in this Tom-and-Jerry kind of relationship between the two nuclear armed South Asian neighbors.

It’s the Modi-led BJP government, which has been driving this intricate relationship and Islamabad has been responding equally positively.

This has been possible largely because of one factor alone — the super powerful Indian PMO. One man has been largely responsible for this — National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, Modi’s Man Friday and evidently the most powerful man in the PMO. It would be interesting to find out whether the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) was kept in the loop, leave alone being consulted, in any of breathtaking decisions of the Modi government vis-à-vis Pakistan. But the real answer to this question may never be known.

Expect the unexpected. This seems to be the Modi government’s mantra while dealing with Pakistan.

Prime Minister Modi’s surprise visit to Lahore for a few hours on Christmas to wish happy birthday to his Pakistani counterpart seems to be a part of the Modi- Doval doctrine, which has thrown pleasant surprises at civilian and military establishments in Islamabad and Rawalpindi respectively for the past 19 months again and again.

This was the same government that had unilaterally cancelled the foreign secretary level talks in August 2014 and taken an unflinching maximalist stand of “only terror, no Kashmir” for NSA-level talks with Pakistan just a few months ago, which eventually led to cancellation of these talks. The twin developments surprised none. Everyone thought this was the norm in India-Pakistan relations. After all, this is what one has been used to in India-Pakistan context during the decade-long UPA government rule and even before that.

But three recent decisions of the Modi government vis-à-vis Pakistan turned the India-Pakistan relations on their head. First came the Dec. 6 meeting of the NSAs of India and Pakistan in Bangkok, which paved the way for Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj’s visit to Islamabad a few days later. But in hindsight, now one can see that the Doval-Janjua meeting in Bangkok not only melted the ice between the two sides, not only formally roped in Pakistan’s powerful military in the decision -making process for the first time as Gen. Nasir Janjua derives his power from the Pakistan Army, but also perhaps discussed a long-term bilateral engagement map at the highest level.

The work done by the two NSAs came to full bloom when Modi diverted his plane from Kabul to Lahore, a spontaneous decision after he called birthday boy Nawaz Sharif and the Pakistani PM chided him in Punjabi why he was returning home “sookhe sookhe” when he was so close to Lahore. “Sookhe sookhe” in Punjabi literally means bone dry. What Sharif meant was that his granddaughter was getting married and he would do well to break bread with him in Lahore on this auspicious occasion. Modi decided on the spur of the moment to divert his plane from Kabul to Lahore, becoming the first Indian PM to visit Pakistan in 12 years and the first-ever Indian PM who took this decision all by himself without involving his aides or the foreign office. This decision of Modi dwarfed two very significant legs of his foreign trip to Moscow and Kabul.

The suddenness of the visit took everyone unawares in the two countries, including the outgoing Indian high commissioner in Pakistan T.C.A. Raghavan who had just three hours to scramble to Lahore from Islamabad. This proved that no one in the MEA was aware of what Modi was having up his sleeve.

This brings us to the vital question whether Modi has embarked upon an adventure as the Congress party has alleged? Another pertinent question is whether a complex relationship with a difficult neighbor like Pakistan can be managed by taking decisions at the highest levels without the structured involvement of the foreign office of the two sides?

Modi’s style of functioning, especially vis-à-vis Pakistan, suggests that he is running a presidential form of government. In fact, he is running India’s Pakistan policy in exactly the same way in which military rulers of Pakistan conducted their India policy wherein their political parties, political set-up and the foreign office were dwarfed by the top leader.

India has never experienced this methodology of dealing with Pakistan, except for a short duration of Indira Gandhi’s premiership during a few months before the 1971 war.

The subtle message of the Modi-Doval Doctrine at work is that in the worst-case scenario this style of India-Pakistan engagement doesn’t work eventually and things are back to square one, but what is the harm in trying this route.

Whether this route works or not, one immediate and most significant outcome of Modi’s bold and unprecedented outreach to Pakistan is that it has completely silenced the international community. The world can no longer accuse India of playing Big Brother to Pakistan and not doing enough to normalize relations with the neighbor.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in the Column section are their own and do not reflect RiyadhVision’s point-of-view.

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