Don8217;t puncture this bus

Fifty years of suspicion doesn8217;t evaporate like the morning dew. Sometimes a perceived slight or a word spoken out of turn could stoke old animosities and even derail the current process of normalising relations between India and Pakistan. Pakistan8217;s Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz, by unleashing the K-word on unsuspecting Indian MPs currently on a goodwill trip to Pakistan, was certainly being less than diplomatic. All the more so since the occasion was a luncheon that he was hosting for his guests from across the border who were in Islamabad in an unofficial capacity. By stating that unless the issue of Kashmir is settled, peace will continue to elude South Asia, Aziz was saying nothing new. It was the familiar mouthing of a familiar nostrum that Pakistan has flogged in UN fora and out of it these 50 years.

The question is: how should India respond to this stance? Should it allow itself to be fazed by it, or should it take such rhetoric in its stride, perceiving it as the inevitable noise the Nawaz Sharifgovernment has to make in order to mollify the hardliners in Pakistan who have long advocated a tough, uncompromising posture towards India. Maturity demands the latter course, considering the significant, even historic, progress on the friendship road that has been made by both countries over the last few weeks. After all, when Sharif had breathed fire and brimstone at Kiel on Kashmir Day, and vowed 8220;moral and political8221; support for the right to 8220;self-determination8221; of the Kashmiri people, India sensibly preferred not to be provoked. Sometimes strategic silences can be as useful as angry protests. There is, after all, a great deal at stake. Never, in the last 50 years, has a Pakistani prime minister stated so frankly a willingness to talk, as Nawaz Sharif did in an interview given to this newspaper earlier this month. Never, in the last 50 years, has an Indian prime minister agreed to ride the bus of friendship as readily as A.B. Vajpayee has done. There are any number of politicians and bureaucrats inboth countries whose careers depend on keeping the enmity between the two countries alive, and whose greatest desire is to puncture the tyres of that bus to Lahore. Their project must be defeated.

But the bus journey is only a beginning. There is a lot more to negotiate than just the distance that lies between Delhi and Lahore. As a testimony to the seriousness of this quest, the talks now being conducted at the foreign secretary level, must be upgraded in the immediate future to a dialogue between the ministers in charge of foreign affairs in both nations. This would make for a certain directness that should help the larger process of normalisation immensely. As Sharif put it, why do both countries have to persist in approaching each other via Bhatinda? Why indeed? The fact that India and Pakistan are now nuclear states makes this dialogue both vital and necessary. What must be ensured, first and foremost, is the elimination of even the remotest possibility of a war between the two. This would require morethan casual confidence-building measures, although they contribute immensely toward building the necessary climate to achieve the larger objective.