Jaishankar’s Islamabad visit for SCO: How India’s foreign policy has outgrown its Pakistan fixation

Since the last few days, there has been a lot of debate going on whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi should visit Pakistan or not for the upcoming summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). The debates had started after Pakistan sent an invitation to the Indian PM in August. However, laying all the speculation to rest, it turns out that India will be represented by only the External Affairs Minister, S Jaishankar, at the summit.

Nevertheless, it has still not stopped the rumour mills, who are now churning commentary that even Jaishankar’s visit is a sign of an impending thaw between the two countries. Various reports in the media are claiming that this will be the first time in the last nine years when an Indian foreign minister will be travelling to Pakistan for a visit. In 2015, it was the then External Affairs Minister, Late Sushma Swaraj, who had last visited Pakistan to attend the Heart of Asia conference. Since then, the relations between the two countries have deteriorated significantly, for which a lot of blame goes to Pakistan since the state there has still not stopped backing anti-India terrorists tacitly.

Interestingly, due to multiple reports claiming that Jaishankar’s visit may bring some degree of warmth in their bilateral relationship, the minister himself had to come on record and clear the air. While responding to questions at an event, he said that he is undertaking this tour to solely attend the SCO summit and not to discuss India’s bilateral relations with Pakistan. In fact, no bilateral engagement is even on the cards during this visit. From his remarks, it is quite clear that the Indian government is just following the tradition of sending its foreign minister to the Heads of Government level summit, where Pakistan only happens to be the venue of choice, and thus nothing more should be read into it.

What Jaishankar iterated in response to the rumours of thaw between India and Pakistan is nothing new. In the last ten years, the Modi government has followed a consistent policy on Pakistan, especially since the 2016 SAARC summit, which was scheduled to be held in the country but was boycotted after a terror attack in Uri.

Since then, any effort towards regional cooperation with Pakistan has been linked to its support for anti-India terrorism, where the current government has articulated on multiple occasions that no progress in bilateral relations or regional integration is possible until there is an ‘atmosphere free of terror’. This has not only led to a deadlock in SAARC but has also led to a sense of stagnation in India-Pakistan relations. Still, the Modi government is unrelenting in its pursuit of isolating Pakistan regionally as well as in highlighting its shady antecedents as a state sponsor of terror at various global forums.

Actually, the last decade has proved to be quite significant in rectifying the ‘Pakistan fixation’ in India’s foreign policy. Since the end of the Cold War and India’s embrace of economic reforms, a sense of pragmatism was infused in the country’s foreign policy, where it looked forward to court, multiple partners for mutual benefit. This naturally led India to normalise its relations with China and Pakistan as well. But the same pragmatism became a big folly when Pakistan mistook India’s offer of peaceful relations as a sign of its weakness.

This was much evident during the successive leaderships of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, whose vision of a stable Indian subcontinent based on a cooperative equation between India and Pakistan was returned back with more violence by the leaders of Pakistan. If Vajpayee years saw Kargil infiltration and a subsequent war, then Manmohan years saw the 26/11 attack when India’s maritime security was breached by Pakistani terrorists.

Despite this, Indian leaders, especially PM Singh, were liberal at heart and believed that mutual economic interdependency would bring lasting peace between the two countries. He didn’t take into account the fact that the Pakistani military was the largest stakeholder in their economy, and it would never allow de-securitisation of economic relations with India for its own commercial benefit. It was nothing short of a miracle that the Modi government came into power and realised that the Indian foreign policy was suffering from a ‘let’s make peace with Pakistan’ problem.

One of the first things that it did was to increase stakes in India’s engagement with the world by seeking a closer relationship with great powers such as the United States, Russia, and France. It then shifted attention to another great power, China, and took multiple steps to balance its rise, which had started to manifest as aggression on the Himalayan border. All this was well supported by India’s own economic rise, where the country has now become the fifth largest economy in the world by nominal GDP.

Once the current dispensation objectively analysed its position in the world, it also assessed Pakistan’s place in its grand strategy. Till now, Pakistan had reduced to a fainter version of itself with myriad economic problems, immense poverty, and a fragmented polity with so many separatist movements going on inside the country. In fact, even as I write, a terror attack has taken place in their Sindh province at the Karachi airport, where two Chinese nationals have perished. The responsibility for the attack has been claimed by Baloch separatists, who are just one of the many problems that the Pakistani state faces today.

In such a scenario, Pakistan is no more that neighbour with whom India needs better and stable ties to succeed in its ambitions to be a great power. It has become just that neighbour who should have enough problems to keep its leadership busy; otherwise, they would foment more troubles in India. It is also that neighbour about whom the biggest concern now is that what if it implodes internally? After all, a rising India would have to devote a precious amount of energy to manage a refugee crisis given that we share a three thousand kilometres long border with each other across a vast stretch of territory.

The calculations that dominated the India-Pakistan relationship in the past have changed dramatically in the last decade. While India has raced ahead economically, Pakistan’s strategic choices have made it a terror-infested country and a vassal state of China, which is dependent on external bailouts to keep its economy floating.

It not only seems silly but almost sounds like a joke today when Indian intellectual elites plead for Pakistan’s case by telling the current leadership to engage with it. But the good news is that the current Indian government understands the nefarious motives of Pakistani leaders.

The political elites in that country are not interested in any peace, but they only want to milk the geopolitical advantage of being an immediate neighbour of India. If they used it during the Cold War to draw benefits from the Americans to contain India, then they have found a similar patron in China today.

Interestingly, India has also changed the orientation of its foreign policy by recognising how it is China and not Pakistan, which is the more credible challenge to its rising power status. It is for this reason that India has joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, facilitated by its good friend Russia. The SCO as a grouping provides bigger wings to India’s global outreach. Here it has made sincere attempts to boost trade with the Eurasian region as well as present alternative connectivity plans to take on the Chinese Belt and Road initiative.

But all this is lost on a section that can’t think beyond Pakistan when it comes to foreign policy. Despite the advances that India has made in the last decade, there still exists a lobby that advocates for closer relations with Pakistan. That lobby would not change its ways because appeasing Pakistan or even China seems to be their ideological or professional compulsion. But the people at large must understand that the ship to make peace with Pakistan has sailed.

The only legitimate option for India is to manage any potential fallout of that country’s ultimate failure and enable its own rise on smoother terms. India is doing exactly that. It is now waiting for Pakistan’s vast terror industry to crumble under its own weight.

The author is a New Delhi-based commentator on geopolitics and foreign policy. She holds a PhD from the Department of International Relations, South Asian University. She tweets @TrulyMonica. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.