The basic thrust of the narrative emanating from the visiting Pakistan home minister, Rehman Malik, has regrettably turned out to be so very different from what it should have been. Of late the stated intention of both New Delhi and Islamabad has been to take steps to turn the tide of public perception against the backdrop of the ghastly Mumbai attacks of November 2008 which froze bilateral relations on account of the bitterness caused in India.
The anger here was traceable not just to the Pakistani provenance of the terrorists but to the blasé Islamabad response to the outrage, its denial until it was caught out that the attackers were Pakistani and that the detailed planning of the strike had occurred inside Pakistan with the involvement of persons who included ISI and Army personnel. Given this backdrop, with Mr Malik here — at his own request — to formally launch a mutually agreed liberalised visa regime between the two countries, the visitor should have been gracious and less prone to tilt on the side of falsehood.
The visiting minister said three things that are deeply offensive. One is the implication that there was nothing particularly abominable about the Mumbai attacks as similar events occur frequently in Pakistan. This seeks to obfuscate the fact that for Indians it was foreigners, especially Pakistani nationals, who carried out the terrorist strike while such ventures are executed by home-grown terrorists when they take place in Pakistan. The second is placing the Ayodhya mosque demolition on the same footing as the Mumbai attacks, implying that the latter was in response to the former. This has dangerous communal connotations. It also wilfully ignores the reality that the Indian system is at work to bring the guilty of Ayodhya to book, and that the disturbing Ayodhya development caused revulsion even within the majority community in India.
Lastly, while being here on what might have been a visit to generate goodwill, Mr Malik chose to be crass about the torture and killing of Captain Saurabh Kalia, who became a prisoner of war during the Kargil fighting. He should have known better. Capt. Kalia’s body was handed over to the Indian military under proper signatures pointing to signs of torture and severing of body parts. The allusion to the Kalia case came on a day when the Supreme Court had asked the government if the matter was not fit to be taken before the International Court of Justice.
The new visa regime has positive features that will encourage trading ties between the two countries, and foster bilateral tourism and people-to-people contacts. But the visiting home minister’s utterances have negated the goodwill aspect, making normalisation efforts look like little more than a governmental project.