Former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan, Ajay Bisaria believes that continued terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir by Pakistan-backed terror outfits would keep on pushing back any hopes of normalcy in India-Pakistan relations.
On Sunday, seven unarmed, innocent civilians were gunned down by terrorists in the Ganderbal district of Jammu and Kashmir. A Pakistan-based terror outfit 'The Resistance Front' (TRF) has claimed responsibility for the terror attack.
The attack comes at a time just days after External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar visited Islamabad for a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, where he had also exchanged routine greetings with Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar.
That has been the story of India-Pakistan relations. It is very cyclical. Every time there is a forward movement, there is an accident, or an act of terrorism. Terrorism is the dealbreaker in this relationship, Bisaria told IANS on the sidelines of the NDTV World Summit in New Delhi on Tuesday.
The former envoy was saying, "There is some positivity" attached to the visit of EAM, though no formal bilateral discussion took place during EAM Jaishankar's 24-hour stay in Islamabad last week.
India was giving a clear indication that we would like to normalize the relation. There were no official bilateral discussions, but at least there was nothing that was extremely negative that occurred. The hope was that there would be some forward positive movement, but the acts of terrorism that continue to happen in Srinagar always present a major threat to this relationship, he said.
He said Pakistan is indeed facing a gigantic crisis but, most importantly, a giant security challenge on the western border.
"It is also facing a huge economic challenge. It's gone into its 24th IMF programme and the long-term economic issues have not been settled. It's also going through a political churn because the civil-military relationship is also not very good. Imran Khan, the former prime minister, continues to be in jail. So, Pakistan itself is in a fairly unstable phase at this point of time," Bisaria told IANS in an interview.
Bisaria had been High Commissioner of India to Pakistan since 2017. He was summoned by Islamabad on August 5, 2019, following the abrogation of Article 370, to leave the country. He was High Commissioner of India to Canada since 2020 from March till June 2022.
Ambassador Sanjay Kumar Verma who replaced Bisaria is one of the "other targeted diplomats and officials" pulled out by New Delhi from Canada on 14 October in the wake of persisting "hostility" towards India by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
For Bisaria, the massive deterioration in India-Canada ties comes as a "surprise".
"The Canada relationship, and the turn it took, comes as a surprise. This is an irony because it's actually a very strong relationship between India and a Western power, both democracies. The geopolitical interests are aligned because Canada's Indo-Pacific strategy considers India a critical partner. So I think this is a story of a mishandled and mismanaged security problem that could have been handled much better," he said.
"The whole thing should have been handled at the security, not political level. It did not start this way. It's an extreme reaction to annexation. When it's handled on the political level, then decibels go up and extreme measures like expelling diplomats have been taken. Hope better sense prevails and this relationship also stabilizes a bit, he added.
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