Pakistan: Now or Never?

India-Pakistan – cricket, spooks and peace

“Cricket diplomacy” has always been one of the great staples of the relationship between India and Pakistan. The two countries have tried and failed before to use their shared enthusiasm for cricket to build bridges, right back to the days of Pakistan President Zia ul-Haq, if not earlier.

So when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced last week that he was inviting Prime Minister Yusuf  Raza Gilani and President Asif Ali Zardari to watch the semi-finals of the Cricket World Cup in Mohali, India, the temptation was to dismiss it as an old idea.

Yes, it would be the first visit by a leader of either country to the other since the November 2008 attack on Mumbai.  Yes, the invitation came at a time when relations between the two countries were already thawing. And yes, the Middle East is changing so fast that you would expect –  in the way that warring siblings do — that India and Pakistan would bury their differences at a time when the outside world has become so unpredictable.

But the instinct for cynicism is unerring. India and Pakistan have tried and failed to make peace for so long that it is easy, lazily easy, to predict that this latest initiative will also come to nothing. Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, himself a participant in cricket diplomacy in 2005, wrote it off in 2000:

`”We have been trying all kinds of bus diplomacy and cricket diplomacy and everything. Why has all of it failed? It has failed because the core issue was not being addressed … because there is only one dispute, the Kashmir dispute … others are just aberrations, minor differences of opinion which can be resolved,” he told The Hindu in an interview in 2000.

Yet even after Mumbai, even after years of fighting over Kashmir, even after all the failed diplomatic initiatives of the past, I still found myself regularly  checking on Google and Twitter to see whether Pakistan had accepted the invitation to the cricket match. When Zardari’s spokeswoman Farahnaz Ispahani announced on her Twitter feed that Gilani would be going to Mohali, the news was retweeted with the speed once reserved by traditional media for attendance at U.S.-Soviet summits.

Over the years, each time something like this has happened, enthusiasm about a breakthrough in India-Pakistan relations has been swiftly disabused.

from India Insight:

Kashmir marks 20 years of conflict, peace still distant

One of the world's longest-running separatist insurgencies, one that has killed tens of thousands of people in Kashmir, completed two decades last month.

The strife-torn region witnessed a period of relative calm, but a recent spate of rebel attacks is a grim reminder of the tensions in Kashmir at the heart of enmity between nuclear-armed neighbours India and Pakistan.

A series of skirmishes across Kashmir's border between the South Asian rivals, which claim the disputed region in full but rule in parts, also underline decades of mistrust between two countries which have fought two wars over the region.

With diplomatic limbo between India and Pakistan and stalled peace talks between New Delhi and region's separatists, peace seems a distant dream.

Yasin Malik, one of Kashmir's most influential separatist leaders, recently told Reuters in an interview that the region risks a return to militancy and violent protests if India fails to push a stalled peace process.

After two decades of campaign, little headway is visible for resolution of Kashmir which New Delhi calls the crown of India, while for Islamabad it is Pakistan's jugular vein.

"For God's sake, don't give our next generation a sense of defeat. If you are giving them a sense of defeat, you are pushing them for another revolution," Malik told BBC.