The apparent thaw in India-Pakistan relations at the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation summit in Thimphu is illusory. The Indian prime minister took three risky political initiatives to restart a dialogue with Pakistan — at his level at Ekaterinburg and Sharm el-Sheikh last year and at the foreign secretary level this year at New Delhi. Pakistan has rebuffed him each time by not delivering on bringing expeditiously to justice those responsible for the Mumbai massacre and acting credibly against jihadi groups targeting India. Tangible steps in this direction would have strengthened the prime minister’s hand for pursuing his conciliatory course towards Pakistan, despite domestic opposition. Unfortunately, Pakistan misreads signals from India because of its inherently negative thinking towards us; it wants to score points rather than respond constructively to a well-meaning, even if not always well-advised, Indian approach. This fourth initiative at Thimphu will meet the same fate.

Pakistan is treating the dialogue issue as a game of one-upmanship. If India has favoured a step by step approach — broadening the dialogue as Pakistan acts on terrorism and the trust shattered by the Mumbai attack is rebuilt — Pakistan has wanted to move straightaway to a composite dialogue. If India rightly wants to focus on terrorism in the first instance, Pakistan wants to shift the focus back to Kashmir. It seeks to diffuse the issue of terrorism, on which it enters the dialogue on the defensive, within a larger agenda. The insistence on a composite dialogue connotes that Pakistan has done all that it can and needs to do on the terrorism front and it is time for India to move on.

Pakistan believes India made the overture to hold foreign secretary-level talks because of pressure from the United States of America and recognition that the policy of spurning a dialogue until the issue of terrorism is adequately addressed had run its course. It has cast India’s refusal to hold a dialogue as “coercive diplomacy”, to which, driven by its complexes, it feels compelled not to yield. Pakistan does not consider its use of the terrorism weapon, spiking with the traumatic Mumbai attack, as “coercion”, but views as such India’s political demand that it cease supporting terrorism to facilitate a constructive dialogue on a sustained basis. Sensing that it has crossed the hump on Mumbai, it now characterizes India’s Mumbai refrain as “boring”(as if its 63-year-old Kashmir refrain has not become, by this reckoning, mind-numbing). Its claim that the backlash of overdoing the Mumbai incident has caused loss of all public sympathy for India in Pakistan shows how effectively the public mind is conditioned by the propaganda of the ruling class and how fragile the supposed people-to-people friendship is.

Pakistan also believes that its successes and India’s diplomatic failures on the Afghanistan front persuaded India to rethink its no-dialogue strategy. India saw that whereas military gains in Swat and South Waziristan against the Taliban and the West’s political outreach to these forces strengthened Pakistan’s hand vis-à-vis the US and burnished its anti-terrorist credentials, India found itself excluded from the Istanbul Conference on Afghanistan and marginalized at the one in London.

This confidence that Pakistan’s flanks have been reasonably secured against US pressure on the terrorism front would explain Pakistan’s posture of not being desperate for a dialogue with India. It cold-shouldered the Indian proposal for a second round of foreign secretary-level talks in Islamabad unless its road map to move quickly towards a resumption of the composite dialogue was accepted. Its more embracing dialogue pitch — for it to mean more than diplomatic gamesmanship — should logically be accompanied by efforts to narrow differences than, as Pakistan is actually doing, raising contention levels.

Infiltration of terrorists from Pakistan is showing an upward trend. On Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan has reverted to its traditional self-determination and United Nations resolutions rhetoric. Hafiz Saeed is being allowed to rant against India and fan jihadi sentiments — he is a useful tool to remind India of the wounds Pakistan can inflict — while being shielded against any legal action on the plea that no evidence of his involvement in the Mumbai attack has been presented by India. The United Jihad Council in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir is not being reined in. Pakistan is courting the most militant of the Kashmiri separatists. Pakistan has opportunistically distorted General Deepak Kapoor’s remarks on India’s capacity to fight a two-front war and his unveiling of a ‘Cold Start doctrine’ to whip up feelings all round against the Indian threat, with the latest Pakistani Azm-e-Nau-3 exercises projected as a warning against any Indian adventurist thinking. Recently, while speaking on the fissile material cut-off treaty at the Conference on Disarmament at Geneva, Pakistan’s permanent representative assailed India bilaterally. Pakistan seeks every opportunity to attack the Indo-US nuclear deal with arguments intended to incite the non-proliferation lobby in the US, still unhappy with the exception made for India, and fend off concerns about its own expanding nuclear activities by blaming India’s intransigence and US nuclear favouritism.

Pakistan is frontally opposing our presence in Afghanistan, using Western dependence on it for war-related logistics as a lever to curtail our activity there. There are serious reports about its involvement in the bombing of our embassy in Kabul and the targeting of our aid contingent there. It is making propagandist claims that our consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad are engaged in materially and financially supporting the insurgency in Baluchistan. Excluding us from the Istanbul conference on Afghanistan may have been a tactical victory, but how does this refusal to dialogue multilaterally with India on a problem involving a SAARC country square with calls for a broad-based dialogue with India bilaterally?

India’s supposed high-handedness over water flows is now being built by Pakistan into a central issue. In his National Assembly address earlier in April President Asif Ali Zardari mentioned it even before Kashmir. Pakistan wants to move out of the legal and technical constraints of the Indus waters treaty and give itself room to agitate on the issue politically. The public mind in Pakistan is, therefore, being poisoned against India on this highly emotive issue, more so as climate change scenarios predict glacier melt in the Himalayas and water shortages in the region. With the Kashmir issue losing traction internationally, the Pakistani establishment is building up a new issue to justify continuing confrontation with India and internationalizing the matter. True to form, the Pakistani side raised this issue in its recent strategic dialogue with the US.

Of late, India had begun to show uncharacteristic and commendable firmness in rejecting a full-fledged dialogue with Pakistan unless it behaves as a decent, normal State on terrorism issues. At Thimphu, India has conceded a political level dialogue without any bankable progress on the terrorism issue, but the demand for resuming the composite dialogue has been resisted. Mercifully, a joint statement — which would have put more pressure on us to concede ground — has been avoided. It is important not to fortify an already triumphant Pakistan in its belief that it can always outmanoeuvre a vacillating India. At Thimphu, Pakistan conceded nothing and therefore the so-called thaw there will herald no spring in India-Pakistan relations.