The Council of Foreign Ministers’ of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO) at Goa was overshadowed by an India-Pakistan slanging match. This is unfortunate. China dominates the SCO, and Pakistan is a member too. India has good relations with neither, but the SCO gives Delhi a place at the table in Eurasia, from where it can not only watch over its interests in Central Asia and be part of regional conversations on Afghanistan but also engage with adversaries. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s meeting with his Chinese counterpart Qin Gang on the sidelines of the SCO showed that such conversations are possible even with a neighbour that has made incursions into Indian territory in Eastern Ladakh, covets Arunachal Pradesh, and by Delhi’s own reckoning has destabilised the Line of Actual Control to the point where the relationship is now fragile.
If Delhi can engage such an adversary with civility, it should be able to do so with Pakistan as well. Of course, it did not help that Pakistan’s foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari treated his first visit to India for grandstanding on Kashmir. He made it plain before arrival that he was going to Goa to keep Pakistan’s tryst with the “Shanghai spirit” and not to seek reconciliation with India. At the meeting, that took place on a day that five more soldiers were killed in a second episode with terrorists in two weeks in the Rajouri-Poonch border area in Jammu, his homily — “let’s not get caught up in weaponising terrorism for diplomatic point-scoring” and “root causes” — was asking to be called out. Jaishankar’s response reiterated the political message that Delhi has nothing to talk to Pakistan on Kashmir except the return of parts of the erstwhile state that are under Pakistani occupation. This hawkishness is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.
