Pak minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari will be in India soon, but there are no expectations from the visit. Why?

Zardari’s visit is the first by a Pakistan foreign minister in more than six years. Sartaj Aziz, the de facto foreign minister in the Nawaz Sharif government, visited in 2016 for the Heart of Asia conference.

Earlier this week, in response to a question on Zardari’s visit, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar underlined that India was hosting a multilateral summit of which Pakistan was also a member.

“Where this particular meeting is concerned, we are both members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, so we typically attend its meetings. We are the chair this year, so the meeting is taking place in India this year,” Jaishankar said at a press conference in Panama City.

He added, “It is very difficult for us to engage with a neighbour who practises cross-border terrorism against us. We have always said that they have to deliver on the commitment not to encourage, sponsor, and carry out cross-border terrorism. We continue to hope that one day we would reach that stage.”

The Pakistan Foreign Office announced on April 20 that Zardari would travel to Goa for the meet, in keeping with Pakistan’s “continued commitment to SCO Charter and processes and the importance that Pakistan accords to the region in its foreign policy priorities”.

Separately, Zardari made it clear that he was not looking for bilateral engagement. “It will be a gathering of foreign ministers and I will go there as a representative of Pakistan,” he said to questions about his India visit at a press conference in Islamabad.

He said he would take inputs from all political parties, and batted away a question on the possibility of discussing India-Pakistan ties during the trip by citing SCO rules and regulations that bar bilateral issues from being raised on the platform.

Expectations are low

For New Delhi, extending an invitation to Zardari is in itself a significant move. It came days after Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif made an outreach to India in January with an offer of talks (although it was caveated and diluted the very next day). A month earlier, at a press conference on the sidelines of a conference on terrorism at the UN Security Council, Jaishankar had dismissed Pakistan’s allegations that Indian “agencies” were responsible for a blast outside the home of Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Saeed in Lahore in 2021.

“In terms of what [Pakistan] are saying, the truth is everybody, the world today, sees them as the epicentre of terrorism… I know we’ve been through two and a half years of Covid and a lot of us have brain fog as a result. But I assure you the world has not forgotten where terrorism emanates from, who has their fingerprints over a lot of activities in the region and beyond the region,” Jaishankar said. He also recalled that it was in Pakistan that the mastermind of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US, Osama bin Laden, had been found.

Zardari, who was also in New York at the time, responded to Jaishankar’s remarks by saying that bin Laden was dead, but “the butcher of Gujarat lives and he is the Prime Minister of India”. New Delhi condemned the remark as a “new low, even for Pakistan”, and said the “uncivilised outburst seems to be a result of Pakistan inability to use terrorists and their proxies”.

If this was a pre-existing shadow over the visit, the Poonch ambush in which five soldiers were killed on the same day as Islamabad announced Zardari’s participation in the SCO meeting, was a further spoiler. New Delhi has refrained from accusing Pakistan directly, but a proxy of the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammad called the People’s Anti Fascist Force has claimed the attack. If a Jaishankar-Zardari bilateral meeting was in the works, the April 20 attack on the Army truck certainly sank its chances.

Also, the view in New Delhi seems to be that the political chaos in Pakistan does not provide a suitable atmosphere for bilateral engagement.

Political pressures in Islamabad

Islamabad has its own reasons to talk down any possibility of bilateral engagement. Other than the uncertainty over the government’s continuance, the pressure on it to not engage with India is massive. Imran Khan, whose popularity the government seems to fear, recently said that as Prime Minister, he was pressured by the former chief (2016-22) of the Pakistan Army, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, to restore ties with India.

In this context, a television show in which two senior Pakistani journalists recalled a 2021 informal briefing with Gen Bajwa has added to the pressure on the government. The journalists claimed that Bajwa had said the Pak army was not capable of fighting a war against India. They also spoke about a “sauda” or deal that Bajwa had allegedly cut with India on Kashmir.

The journalists discussed how Imran’s last-minute pullout from a decision to restart trade with India — on the persuasion of his foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi — scuppered a purported plan by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to visit Pakistan in April 2021. (Pakistan had stopped the trade in August 2019 after the constitutional changes in Jammu and Kashmir.)

The head of the Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR), Maj Gen Sharif Chaudhary appeared to try to set the record straight this week when he said that during a visit to the Line of Control earlier in April, army Chief Gen Asim Munir had “sent a message in clear words that the army is capable of defending every inch of the country’s territory”. He also said that, “if need be we can take this battle into the enemy’s territory”.

Chaudhary dismissed as “fake propaganda” India’s accusations of cross-border infiltration. “I also feel it important to say that if India thinks of any misadventure due to any miscalculation or misunderstanding, then let there be no doubt that the army would give a befitting response with national support,” he said.

India, the ISPR chief claimed, had violated the ceasefire 56 times this year. Although ceasefire violations took place in the thousands in 2020, causing deaths and injuries to civilians and soldiers on both sides, an impression is now being created that Pakistan has gained nothing from the ceasefire.

Significantly, Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khwaja Asif is attending Friday’s meeting of SCO defence ministers only virtually, not in person. Meanwhile, Qureshi, the former foreign minister, is holding his successor’s feet to the fire by telling him “not to forget Kashmiris” during his visit next week.

“I hope he will defend the rights of Kashmiris there and fully defend Pakistan’s historic position on occupied Kashmir. [I hope] he will express his concern over the mistreatment of minorities in India. It is hoped that Bilawal will not forget to meet Hurriyat leaders during his visit to India,” the daily News reported him as saying in his hometown Multan.

If the visit takes place as scheduled, Zardari, who takes pride in following the footsteps of his grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as Pakistan’s “youngest foreign minister”, and clearly nurses higher ambitions, may need to prove a point to those back home watching his performance on his first tour of India.

Unpredictability of multilaterals

Despite strenuous assertions on both sides that Zardari’s in-person participation at Goa will do nothing to break the hostility between the two countries as no bilateral engagement is planned between him and Jaishankar, multilaterals have produced surprises in the past. The most famous of these was Gen Pervez Musharraf’s handshake with Atal Bihari Vajpayee at the 2002 Kathmandu SAARC summit, which led to a six-year India-Pakistan thaw.

The opposite, a cold shoulder, could happen too, as Sartaj Aziz found at Amritsar. At this time though, it would be considered an achievement if both sides manage to get through Goa with ties remaining just as they are — no better, no worse.