A Shaky Dialogue

Dawn 29 July 2011, Opinion
By: Cyril Almeida 


IT looked good, it sounded good — and in the fraught world of Pak-India relations, that was probably good enough, for now.
The young Pakistani princess outshone her dapper Indian counterpart; the media was agog; and the outside world looked on approvingly. So are the constituencies for peace in India and Pakistan back with a bang? Not quite.
What this week has been about is atmospherics and optics. Make the environment in which talks are conducted more congenial and make all the noises necessary to reassure the other side of interest in talks — without ceding anything meaningful on any front.
Improving atmospherics and optics is nothing to scoff at when you’re talking about a six-decade-old problem to rival any other on the global stage. But Pakistan and India have been down this road many times before. It is reasonable to ask, will this time be any different?
On the Indian side, the peace constituency appears to have been bolstered by at least four things. The Indian PM and his national security adviser are still keen on better ties with Pakistan. The US is pushing for an improvement in Pak-India relations because of the potential regional dividends.
India has realised that the post-Mumbai attempt to diplomatically isolate Pakistan was a bad idea because the rest of the world doesn’t see Pakistan through an Indian lens. And India wants to see the Mumbai perpetrators brought to justice, something unlikely to ever occur if India disengages Pakistan.
But the first real public test for the peace constituency in India will come when it has to push domestically for a deal on some of the mid-level stuff, a deal on Sir Creek perhaps or more

Look back in sorrow - By Ardeshir Cowasjee

By Ardeshir Cowasjee

IN times of dire turmoil, when things on all fronts seem hopeless and one does not know what might happen in the coming minutes, when the system just does not work because those put in place to work it are, to put it mildly, unfit — the leadership consisting of alleged criminals, hoodlums, substandard minds, liars and deceivers — some of us look back into time when violence was not the theme of the day.

This year has been a beast, it opened with a bang, literally and January has been followed by incidents awful and dispiriting, the month of May being the high point in what is very much Pakistan’s war against itself.

What never ceases to amaze is that those guilty for the happenings and disgrace, even humiliation — particularly of the not-so-merry month of May — are all in place, where they were, having evidenced not an iota of shame. The shameless flourish, and they are legion.

Mid-year blues were with us last month when coincidentally a number of columnists came out to remind us what this sad country once was, and how life was lived in consonance with the rest of the democratic free world, of how there was hope, of how there was enjoyment, of how life for the particular few held happiness.

Down the decades we have all failed to even begin to learn from history that when religiosity — the stressed false selective practice of religion — overtakes a state, imposed upon it by those who use the easiest of artifacts, their own brand of religion, for reasons of expediency or to prop up a dicey or failing regime, things fall