India's failed pursuit of Pakistan's isolation |
In September 2016, standing before a rally in Kerala, Narendra Modi made a promise. India, he declared, would launch an all-out campaign to isolate Pakistan. It was the kind of thinking that plays well in a crowd - muscular, self-righteous, vengeful. A decade on, Pakistan is simultaneously engaged with Washington, Beijing, Tehran and Riyadh; has brokered a ceasefire between Iran and the United States; and has been credited by Donald Trump for saving the world from a catastrophe so many times that New Delhi has stopped counting.
To understand how this happened, one has to make sense of the strategy. It was never simply about terrorism or surgical strikes or water treaties. Those were mere instruments. The objective was larger and more ideological: the delegitimisation of Pakistan as a state, as an idea, and as the political expression of Muslim identity in South Asia.
The Hindutva project that has governed India since 2014 has always carried a deep discomfort with Pakistan's very existence, rooted in the dream of an undivided Hindu homeland. It is telling, and actually rather significant, that RSS General Secretary Dattatreya Hosabale recently called for India to resume dialogue with Pakistan - a reflection of the fact that even the ideological establishment has quietly conceded that a decade of hostility has produced nothing worth keeping.
What India built was a three-dimensional trap. Internationally, it took the terrorism label - globalised and weaponised after 9/11 - and applied it to Pakistan. It travelled to every nook and corner of the world and walked........