MEMOIRS of retired Indian and Pakistani diplomats contain accounts of their postings to Islamabad and New Delhi, spent in professional pugilism and recollected in tranquillity.
Former Indian high commissioner Ajay Bisaria’s book Anger Management: The Troubled Diplomatic Relationship between India and Pakistan belongs to that genre. Its adversarial counterpart is former Pakistan HC Abdul Basit’s Hostility: A Diplomat’s Diary on Pakistan-India Relations.
Bisaria served in Islamabad for 20 months before being summarily ‘expelled’ in 2019 — the first among his 24 predecessors to suffer this indignity.
His book is the most comprehensive survey to date of the first seven years in a conflict that could well score a century. It is structured to cover seven decades and some years, from 1947 into 2023. It could carry the subtitle ‘Seven Pillars of Unwisdom’.
Bisaria notes that the chemistry between Indo-Pak leaders raised hopes.
According to him, three ideas “of identity, territory, and security have populated scholarship on the subcontinent”. They recur in his narrative. He tells us that “a lesson all Indian envoys to Pakistan learn at some point or the other: Pakistan policy in India is driven personally by India’s prime........