India-Pakistan dialogue : flickers of hope ?

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s impromptu call on Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif  to wish him Happy Birthday in December  has raised a flurry of optimism on Indo-Pak relations. Modi’s drop-in call on Sharif en route to Delhi  from Kabul where he had gone to inaugurate the Indian-built Afghanistan’s  parliament building was welcomed as a happy surprise both in Pakistan and India.

The momentum continues with their likely meeting in Washington where both leaders have been invited to a  nuclear summit hosted by  President Obama on March 31-April 1.  There is also a possibility of  Indo-Pak foreign secretary level  unofficial meeting on the sidelines of a SAARC conference in Nepal  next month in March.

Further  hope for a dialogue revival has come from Pakistan’s filing of  an  FIR  against the possible involvement of some persons in the terrorist attack on the Indian Air Forces base at Pathankot. Islamabad’s  further actions of  taking  Jaish -e- Muhammad’s anti-Indian leader  Maulana Masood Azhar  into protective custody and the upcoming visit of Pakistan’s special investigation team to Pathankot, as agreed with India,  lend yet more hope to the revival of a bilateral dialogue.

Most significantly comes the reported acknowledgement of  Pakistani Prime Minister’s Adviser on Foreign Affairs, Sartaj Aziz, that at least one call made by the terrorists involved in the Pathankot attack was traced to the Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) HQ, the covert-warrior outfit in Pakistan’s Punjab province.

The fly in this whole ointment is the fact that the FIR filed by Pakistan government is against “unknown” persons . The prominent  conspirator,  Masood Azhar named by India, has not been named even as a suspect in the FIR by Pakistan. Nor has he been arrested; he has been taken only in “protective custody.” No wonder India is going to ask the United Nations once again to include Azhar specifically and individually in the list of banned persons along with the Jaish-e- Muhammad outfit which is already in the UN’s list of proscribed organisations.

Pakistan’s  apparent gestures of  thaw in bilateral relations need to be translated into concrete actions, not just in the Pathankot episode but also in the Mumbai attack which has been hanging fire since 2008. For that to happen , Pakistan  needs to  have a re-look at its overall definition of  terrorism . It must abandon its equation of terrorism on its western Afghan border with terrorism on its eastern Indian border. The two brands belong to different categories. Its western border trouble comes from  the Taliban tiger which it has been riding for long. Riding the tiger has never been easy and Pakistan cannot deflect the issues by saying that the Taliban are funded by India. Nor can anybody believe that the recent attack on Bacha Khan university in its frontier province was Indian inspired or financed. Bacha Khan is the name of  Frontier Gandhi  Abdul Ghaffar Khan, one of the most revered legends in India since before the partition of the subcontinent. No Indian agency can ever think of attacking an institution named after him. Pakistan must look into its own ‘gareban’ or fold !

Terrorism on Pakistan’s eastern border with India is altogether of a different brand. To put it bluntly it is inspired, abetted and activated by Pakistan’s own state or non-state actors. Neither India nor anybody else believes the fiction that Pakistan is a victim on both sides of its border. On the eastern side it is certainly not  a hapless victim. It must restrain its state or non-state actors on the eastern side and act against them with the same vigour as it does with actors on its western border.

Pakistan can do it but it must have the will to do it. Will it do it? If it does it will be a game changer not only in the subcontinent but in the entire region.

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British PM juggles hot potatoes from home and Europe

 

 London. Immigration has been a long simmering issue in Britain and every now and then it becomes a hot potato rather difficult to be handled even by seasoned  politicians and party leaders. This time Prime Minister David Cameron has been caught singeing, if not burning, his fingers twice within a fortnight. And it has been a double whammy in both instances, getting embroiled in a combination  of, what his critics call, Islamophobia and  fears of  influx of refugees from war-torn West Asia and migrant workers from Europe.

First , in a bid for better integration of already settled migrants at home Cameron announced a £20million programme aimed at spreading the knowledge of  English language among Muslim women to enable them to interact with the host society and to better understand their rights and responsibilities as citizens. The underlying, though unstated, objective of the campaign targeting Muslim women presumably is aimed at asking them to protect  themselves and their children from jihadist  propaganda and alienation from mainstream society. Muslim community leaders were quick to denounce the targeted campaign as naked Islamophobia while other mainstream opponents denounced it as wrong headed and  discriminatory, saying it should have been directed at all communities whose English language skills were less than adequate. One of the prominent critics has been none other than Lady Warsi , Cameron’s former colleague appointed by him as the first Muslim woman cabinet member.   

Second, while the targeted promotion of English language skills among  Muslim women is still under cloud, the Prime Minister has let fly another language shot calling asylum seekers from Syria and elsewhere as ‘a  bunch of migrants.’   The phrase came up in the cut and thrust of  debate during Commons  PMQs (Prime Minister’s Questions hour). Cameron was referring to Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn’s interaction with  migrants waiting to cross over to Britain from the French camp at Calais known as the ‘Jungle.’ Critics were quick to attack  Cameron for describing poor refugees  as insignificant as a ‘bunch of  bananas.’ The Tory press, on the other hand, went into overdrive  defending Cameron’s phrase as pretty innocuous and normal grammatic usage.  Either way some mud appears to have stuck , especially as it came not too long after Cameron’s earlier description of  migrants as a ‘swarm’ of people which was taken up by critics for comparing migrants to a swarm of  wasps or stinging bees. Perhaps both phrases would not have attracted so much publicity  had they not  come after a much more pejorative description by Cameron’s cabinet colleague Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, who in a moment of thoughtlessness called migrants as ‘marauders’ waiting to barge  into Britain.

A large part of anti-immigrant feeling in more recent years is directly related to fear of jihadist cells at home and abroad.  News stories of young men and women travelling abroad to join the so-called Islamic State or Daesh  add to the climate of suspicion against the community majority of whom are law-abiding citizens. Images posted by Daesh recruits wearing balaclavas and holding AK47 guns and some of them even executing hostages produce revulsion  against terrorists and suspicion against the innocents. The most recent case of  a young mother who escaped from Britain with her toddler son to join Daesh in Syria only to flee back to Britain after  tasting life in Raqqa  for a year under Islamist control naturally hit the headlines. On return she was jailed for six years by a judge at Birmingham Crown Court for knowingly participating in jihadist  terror machine. Her own plea that she had been radicalised and soon disillusioned did not wash. Nor did her father’s plea on similar grounds. The judge said she had been convicted as a terrorist and her movements should be watched for the next 15 years. 

Similar cases and resultant publicity naturally make life more difficult for innocent members of  the community. 

Nor is immigration phobia  a particularly British issue. It is sweeping across the entire continent of  Europe. After Germany’s initial open door welcome to refugees fleeing Syria and other countries, Europe is clearly having second thoughts. The atmosphere has been severely vitiated by the happenings in Cologne during New Year Eve celebrations when several women were sexually harassed and molested by some lone wolves or small groups of refugee hoodlums, apparently from north Africa and West Asia.  A few bad apples, perhaps. But they have tarnished the image of  thousands of  luckless asylum seekers fleeing war and misery at home. The tide is turning against migrants, thanks to the hoodlums, some of whom were perhaps acting as agents provocateur in the name of jihad.   

The Danish parliament’s passage of a law to confiscate any money in excess of just 1,000 euros carried by refugees or asylum seekers seeking shelter in Denmark  has bared the new depth of  feeling against migrants. The explanation  that  the confiscated money would be ploughed back into their rehabilitation expenditure  may sound hollow, yet it underscores  withdrawal symptoms of  Europe’s initial generosity.   Not all of the one million refugees who have entered Germany are sure of being granted final asylum or refugee status. There is loud talk of  migrants  to  be sent back after three or four years when a modicum of peace returns to the war ravaged lands of  Syria , Iraq and the region. The architect of German refugee welcome policy Chancellor Angela Merkel’s own chances of return to power at the next elections are at stake now.

On top of all this, the very stability of European Union is under unprecedented pressure. Britain’s demand for curbs on the free movement of  workers from within the EU member states has entered the final stage. No benefits like the unemployment dole for a number of years or Brexit is the challenging new mantra of  Prime Minister David Cameron. Grant the demands or Britain  exits European Union via  referendum is his clear challenge to EU. He is optimistic about winning some concessions like an ‘emergency brake’ on benefits claimed by incoming workers, mainly from central and Eastern Europe. Questions like the length of the brake, four years as Cameron is demanding, and whether the brake could be applied almost immediately after the referendum, have still to be sorted out. The details of  EU’s draft offer, trumpeted  by him as an ‘important milestone,’ still face objections from EU member states. 

Much tougher opposition to Cameron’s preferred policy of staying in the EU comes from within the UK, and most hawkish elements from within his own party. The opposition Labour party, by and large, favours retaining EU membership. But it is the die-hard opponents within the Conservative fold who, as one commentator said, could do the self-destruct. Basically, it all depends on the final concessions Prime Minster Cameron can extract from the EU and, even more, will they be enough to satisfy the nay-sayers who want  strict border controls to limit the intake of  European migrants.

The referendum, likely in June this year, is unstoppable. Till then it is an open question.

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