Congress Lok Sabha MP Shashi Tharoor recently advocated, through his column in a national newspaper, that India should resume its engagement with Pakistan through a “multi-layered, resilient architecture of contact" instead of summit-level meetings. He argued that India and Pakistan should engage because:

These points have also led Tharoor to suggest a reliance on people-to-people contacts in the hope that this would act as a “pressure valve". Going further, Tharoor believes that while India should maintain its demand that Pakistan end terrorism, if this demand is met even partially, India could allow sporting contacts or Track 2 dialogues. To concretise its demand on terrorism, India could ask for “visible action against known terrorist outfits, the arrest of specific individuals, or curbs on the inflammatory words and actions of proscribed terror organisations".

Tharoor asserts that the objective cannot be to craft a dialogue process for its own sake (one can only say, “Praise the Lord", because one of his party leaders has, for decades, advocated “uninterrupted and uninterruptible" bilateral dialogue), but to create conditions that make such a process sustainable. Without compromising on security, Tharoor wants India to signal that peace is not impossible. He is especially keen that the Indian people understand that peace is not weakness and dialogue is not surrender.

Tharoor’s views on India’s Pakistan policy have to be taken seriously because, as Chair of Parliament’s Standing Committee on External Affairs, his is an important voice in the making of India’s foreign policy. Besides, he has experience in multilateral diplomacy and peacemaking; in an earlier avatar, he was a United Nations civil servant. That experience, and the general principles of UN peacemaking, clearly remain with him; they can be seen in his suggestions for approaches India should pursue with Pakistan.

It could be that Tharoor’s past “diplomatic" experience of peacemaking in other international conflicts prevents him from addressing the real reasons for Pakistan’s continuing animus towards India. Hence, he has advanced propositions and principles that do not apply to an ideological and theological state like Pakistan. Without taking these into consideration, it is impossible to frame a realistic........

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