Permission to Pak JIT implies good optics

All indications are that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has decided to take the terrorist attack on the Pathankot Air Force base in his stride, and pursue his agenda on the India-Pakistan relationship, although he is yet to share its contours with the country.

In the fitness of things, he should do so at the first opportunity in the Budget Session of Parliament since he has agreed to visit Pakistan for the Saarc summit in early November. External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj accepted the invitation on his behalf in Pokhra, Nepal, when she met PM Nawaz Sharif’s foreign policy adviser, Sartaj Aziz, during the Saarc ministerial meeting on Thursday.  

Mr Modi and Mr Sharif are also expected to have a separate conversation when the two meet for the nuclear security summit in the US this month. Apart from extending the invitation to the Indian PM for the Saarc summit, Mr Aziz’s purpose in his talks with Ms Swaraj would have been to gauge if the Indian PM was on track for a meeting with Mr Sharif during the nuclear security talks.

Pakistan is very keen on resuming talks, for which Mr Modi laid the groundwork by visiting Lahore in a surprise move on Christmas day last year, in spite of the Pathankot attack by Pakistani terrorists. Ms Swaraj would have effortlessly re-assured Mr Aziz on this, seeing her leader’s mood. Consistent with this, India conveyed to Pakistan in Pokhra that the visit of Pakistan’s joint investigation team to Pathankot was on, and the Pakistani investigators would arrive on March 27.

Three months have elapsed since the Pathankot attack, and it is far from clear if any forensic evidence of the terrorist assault would survive. Therefore, it seems that permission to the JIT to visit India — in the face of defence minister Manohar Parrikar’s objections — is part of building good optics. Without this it would be hard to sell normalising of India-Pakistan relations to the Indian public.
Not much movement has taken place in Pakistan to apprehend the Pathankot attackers, who are cadre of the Jaish-e-Mohammad, one of the two principal anti-India terrorist outfits raised by the ISI.

For a time the Jaish online journal had stopped publication after the Pathankot attack, but now it has re-started. Meanwhile, the official effort to raise the level of optics continues on both sides. The news of Pakistan giving India intelligence on 10 terrorists having entered this country seems part of the same design. The meeting of foreign secretaries of the two countries, scuppered on account of Pathankot, could be back on track.