India not talking to Pakistan till peace returns to occupied Kashmir is a strange argument

September 11, 2024

ISLAMABAD – INDIA’S home minister says there can’t be any talks with Pakistan until peace comes to Jammu and Kashmir first.

It’s not clear if he was posturing as politicians often do or stating it as conviction common with India’s right-wing nationalists. The backdrop to the comments is the three-phase assembly elections scheduled in Jammu and Kashmir from Sept 18, which Home Minister Amit Shah is keen to win for his party.

Not talking to Pakistan till peace returns to violence-wracked Kashmir makes for a strange argument to keep aloof from an important, in fact, a critical neighbour. It’s particularly strange coming from a country that purports to be working for peace in a distant conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

How could there be peace without talking to key stakeholders in the European theatre? It’s interesting nevertheless that India flaunts an appetite for resolving disputes abroad (not excluding Sri Lanka and the Maldives) while rejecting friendly offers from world capitals to help in its perpetually troubled ties with Pakistan.

Of course, there are those in India’s ruling pack that believe there’s nothing to talk to Pakistan about. The only dispute, they say, is India’s claim on Azad Kashmir, which the Rao government had formalised through a parliamentary resolution in the 1990s. Even that claim needs talks, right? Or, as some ardent nationalists dream, the army would do the job. It’s this kind of alarming rubbish that former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo referred to in his memoirs. He got a midnight call about a crisis that broke out in 2019 between India and Pakistan. Pompeo called it a terrifying stand-off between nuclear neighbours.

To stay with the argument, could Russia and