Anti-clockwise, once again

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Tired of warmongering and bloody terrorism, the people of India and Pakistan want authentic peace. Yet, every time there is a possibility of peace, the hawks on both sides manufacture an inevitable disaster
Sanjay Kapoor Islamabad (Pakistan)

It is hot and dusty in Pakistan's capital. In Islamabad, monsoons still seem an hour and ten minutes away by flight from Delhi, where clouds behave as a trailer of a B-grade Hindi movie - promising a lot without really delivering much. The now on and now off India-Pakistan talks, too, show the same eccentricities of an unpredictable monsoon.

So it was with little expectations that Indian Foreign Minister SM Krishna landed in Islamabad's airforce base at Chaklala to give expression to the spirit of Thimpu. At Thimpu, during the recent SAARC summit in April 2010, the prime ministers of India and Pakistan had agreed to talk with each other to bring down the "trust deficit" and fight the dark shadows of a violent, atavistic past layered by the viciousness of communal/religious fundamentalism and turbulent geo-politics of the region. This was easier said than done. 
Many saw these talks as quite unreal - abstracted from the reality of Pakistan's manifest insincerity in reining in its home grown terrorists like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) that has been busy targeting India. What also created dissonance is Pakistan's inflated expectations about the role it would play in Afghanistan, once the Americans decide to head home in 2011. 

Expectedly, Krishna, on landing at the airport, mentioned the revelations by the LeT operative, James Coleman Headley, who is in custody in the US, over his involvement in the carnage of November 26, 2008, in Mumbai and the imperative of the Pakistan government's response. Krishna's statement had factored India's Home Secretary GK Pillai's explosive statement where he claimed that fresh information from Headleys' interrogation by the National Investigating Agency (NIA) had suggested that Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) conceived and "executed" the Mumbai terror attack. 

Such an allegation took the Pakistanis by surprise. After all, ten days earlier, Union Home Minister P Chidambaram had carried a dossier to Islamabad that was based on the revelations by Headley and demanded action from Pakistan against the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack. Chidambaram did not speak about ISI, but sources told Hardnews that the content of his discussion was little different from that of Pillai. Interestingly, Pakistan's Interior Minister, Rehman Malik, had enthusiastically responded to Chidambaram's demand by promising action in four weeks. In concrete terms this meant giving voice samples of the handlers of terrorists and speeding up the trial of those accused in the Mumbai attack. 

Indian government sources claim that Pillai did not have any more information than what Chidambaram had given to Malik. What he did was to give expression to some of the information that lay tucked in the dossier. The moot question is, why did Pillai choose to speak on the eve of Krishna's departure, when his boss, Chidambaram, had already taken up the matter with his counterpart a few weeks earlier? 

Krishna's mandate to speak with Pakistan was constricted by the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS), where both Defence Minister AK Antony and Chidambaram wanted the foreign minister to stick to the core issue of terror and Pakistan's response to it. Such an approach was considered limiting to any negotiations between the two countries, but members of the CCS thought that the country was not really ready for any breakthrough till Pakistan walked its promise on taking action against the Mumbai terrorists.