India-Pakistan relations: visiting intellectuals underscore need for dialogue

Indian intellectuals on Friday underlined the need for resolving all the outstanding issues between Pakistan and India through dialogue process and addressing each other's concerns through a constructive engagement. Siddharth Varadarajan, former Editor of The Hindu and Senior Fellow at the Center for Public Affairs and Critical Theory, and Ashok Malik, a senior columnist and contributor for leading Indian publications were speaking at Jinnah Institute's Distinguished Speaker Series (DSS) here Friday.
Both the speakers were of the opinion that Indian leadership finally realised that engagement with Pakistan is better than no engagement, and the country's Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar's visit to Islamabad this week has set the stage for improved India-Pakistan relations.
In their respective comments, the two speakers agreed that though it would be unwise to carry unrealistic expectations on major breakthroughs in India-Pakistan relations, it was important to note that ordinary citizens on both sides of the border desire peace between the two neighbours.
They also noted that the Indian military shared the Indian civilian leadership's views on pursuing peace with Pakistan. Both the speakers were of the same opinion on the issue of Kashmir, saying given the Prime Minister Modi's preoccupation with a domestic agenda on economic reform, the issue of Jammu and Kashmir is not a priority for the BJP-led government, yet they pointed out that the two countries need to resolve the issue.
Siddharth Varadarajan said that Pakistan and India need to constructively engage with each other by avoiding the blame game and should address each other's concerns. While speaking on recent transformations in Indian politics, he noted that while it was true the 'Modi surge' beginning in November 2013 had pushed the Congress to the sidelines of Indian politics, the Delhi election symbolized a huge loss for the BJP.
He said it was true that military hardware formed one of the biggest chunks of India's annual imports and Indian companies were likely to emerge as major defence players in coming years. However, the recent spike in defence spending was not inconsistent with recent budgetary trends, and should not be a source of undue alarm in Pakistan.
He stated that one area where the Modi government had been successful was foreign policy, and on assuming office Prime Minister Modi had embarked on a series of high-profile visits.
While he had been lauded for his inaugural invitation to SAARC leaders, the promise of forward-movement in Indo-Pak relations had abruptly ended with New Delhi's unilateral cancellation of Foreign Secretary-level talks last August, he said. He further said that there was cognisance in India of the fact that Pakistan was fighting a difficult war on terrorism and he also agreed with Ashok Malik that India did not benefit from instability and terrorism in Pakistan.
Sharing his views on the performance of the Modi government since 2014, Varadarajan said that Prime Minister Modi should be commended for increasing the BJP's electoral vote share from 18 percent in 2009 to 32 percent in 2014. India's recent election had not been fought along communal lines, he added.
He said that the support and backing of corporate India was also a key element in Prime Minister Modi's rise to power, however one of Modi's greatest challenges in proceeding ahead was mitigating social tensions while taking diverse constituencies ahead. The more Modi's supporters pursued hard-liner Hindutva policies, the greater would be the chances of social disharmony in the Indian society, he pointed out. In his comments, Ashok Malik referred to the issue of India's regional goals, saying one of the key thrusts of current foreign policy thinking was to bolster trade ties with SAARC member states.
With Pakistan, he said that trade and economic co-operation offered a clear pathway to peace, and would considerably help reverse negative perceptions in both countries. He also referred to the changing demographics and the youth dividend that characterised South Asian society. In sheer numbers, India had the largest working age population anywhere in the world, and 65 percent of India's GDP was urban-centric, he added.
Malik said that the rise of Prime Minister Modi had been enabled by the rise of a pan-Indian middle class that was increasingly thinking in macro-economic terms, which in turn had created a bottom-up narrative of nationhood. However, delivering on jobs and employment was likely to remain a challenge for the government until the end of the 2015-16 financial year, he added.