INSIGHT: A tall order? —Ejaz Haider

Here’s a suggestion. Mr Zardari needs to get a Regional 101 on Kashmir and India-Pakistan relations. He must understand that much before he arrived on the scene, India and Pakistan were dealing with each other, testing approaches and vacillating between the conflictual and the cooperative.

Since January 2004 they are interacting in and through a dialogue framework. They are not friends yet but neither are they enemies in a zero-sum mode, though that paradigm, in its dying throes, still lingers on in some sections on both sides.

The most important development is that friction in one area does not lead to overall deterioration in relations. Mr Musharraf, now much reviled for sins other than this, has left a good legacy on India-Pakistan relations and even changed the paradigm on how to resolve Kashmir. Indeed, it is now India’s turn to reciprocate and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s speech at the UNGA shows he is alive to it.

Finally, Mr Zardari must realise that he needs to position himself and become acceptable to Pakistan and the outside world on the basis of what he can substantively do rather than delivering shibboleths acceptable to mainstream Washington, and by extension, America. Specifically on Kashmir, revisiting the past, pegged as it was for India and Pakistan on a different paradigm, does not help in moving forward.

He needs to get his sense of where things stand right. A tall order, that?

INSIGHT: A tall order? —Ejaz Haider