Eternal question: Who to talk to in Islamabad?

The word out of South Block on Pakistan appears to be a 360 degree turn back to UPA II in its closing days. And the question appears eternal about Islamabad: who to talk to in Islamabad. The NDA had begun on a high note after it took office a little over 30 months ago.

PM Modi’s invitation for his swearing-in ceremony to his drop-by at Raiwind on Nawaz Sharif’s birthday, the signature seemed a break from the past of Indo-Pak engagement. But a little over 30 months after Modi’s assumption of office, New Delhi’s Pakistan policy appears in jeopardy. As is usual in these kinds of situations, the supra official ‘third party’ in Indo-Pak dispute – the USA – has asked two capitals to tone down the ‘rhetoric.’

But the question above is hardly rhetorical. For, when the hero of Pakistan Army’s campaign against its own people in Waziristan – though not the Haqqani network – General Raheel Sharif’s visage was staring down the motorists and pedestrians on the roads of the country’s capital city, it did seem that New Delhi has finally found someone to talk to across the western borders.

When Washington feted him for an unprecedented fortnight, it did seem he is the man to be addressed even though he seemed counseled against assuming power in yet another coup of sorts, New Delhi seemed ready to take the short ride from Islamabad to Rawalpindi. The attempt was to engage the repository of policies about India, the Pakistan army.

Yet, today it seems the Indian NSA, Ajit Doval to be at wit’s end on whether he should pick up the phone and talk to Janjua. What caused the breakdown of interlocution, so to say? Is it the summer of discontent in the Kashmir valley? Or is it that all-powerful Corps Commanders of Pakistan army have called a halt to interaction so close to superannuation of Raheel Sharif? Or is it that even a spectre of 1971 haunts the current crop of generals vis-à-vis Balochistan?

Informed sources this side of the border say that Pakistan’s leadership at the moment are showing signs of paranoia about the Narendra Modi-Ajit Doval combination. As one former Indian army general recounted recently, that the class of 2016 at the Royal College of Defence Studies in London had General Raheel Sharif as the first non-British speaker. And in his 45-minute speech he mentioned Ajit Doval and 18 times, Narendra Modi. Considering the RCDS class was a multi-national group – a fact not unknown to an alumnus like Sharif himself – not many would have known who he was so obsessed about.