Whoever wins in Pakistan elections, it will be India setting the terms of engagement

Pakistan is a hard state and its relationship with India is particularly fraught.

Pakistan is heading for another national election on Thursday which in essence is a fight between the scions of two political dynasties, Nawaz Sharif and Bilawal Bhutto, and trying to keep their most charismatic politician Imran Khan off the pitch in the race to become country’s next Prime Minister.

The world’s fifth most populated country with four very geopolitically important neighbours – India, China, Iran and Afghanistan, never had any Prime Minister completing a full term as its army always preferred to lip-sync the political leadership rather than staying in barracks.

Pakistan’s wobbly polity and shaky economy casts a gloomy spell over the population with a median age of 23 years. But Pakistan is a hard state and its relationship with India is particularly fraught.

One of the key outcomes of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign policy is making Pakistan irrelevant to the Indian diplomatic scheme of things. And it has been working well so far.

That means, whoever comes to power in Islamabad, India can continue to be insouciant about it while not being indifferent to the dictum of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee that “we can change our friends but not our neighbours”.

Judging by history, the frontrunner Nawaz Sharif will be keen to keep the United States, China and Saudi Arabia happy, while not abandoning a rapprochement with India which he had tried in all his past three terms in office. Though almost 40 years younger to Sharif, Bilawal Bhutto will find it more difficult to crack the India code, especially if he continues to be guided by impulses and impetuousness.

With the status of Jammu and Kashmir changing after the Indian government revoked Article 370 of the Constitution, none of the past templates of conversation between the two sides will be of any use for a meaningful engagement.

A lot depends on what comes out on a fresh drawing board, if at all the new Prime Minister of Pakistan has the political imagination and earns the magnanimity of the army to pursue a new course of engagement.

But in the existing geopolitical landscape, there is very little incentive for India to either make substantial concessions or strike a more than conciliatory pose with Pakistan. There is no war in Afghanistan where Americans need Pakistan, because of which the country has difficulty converting the American necessity as a bargaining chip elsewhere.

Pakistan was once the most important ally of the United States in South Asia, but that is now a relic from the Cold War era. The old exhortation from Washington that India and Pakistan must talk is as good as a forgotten chorus of a song from another age. The Arab world hardly sees the Kashmir issue through the old prism.

There is greater global consensus on the dangers of terror groups operating out of Pakistan. China-Pakistan bonhomie will continue the way it has always been, whether India talks to Pakistan or not.

That said, having no contact with Pakistan can never be an option for India and a minimal engagement is a necessity with a nuclear-armed neighbour. But present world realities give India the option of verifying everything before trusting anything with regard to this neighbour.

Jayanth Jacob is a foreign policy commentator who covered the ministry of external affairs for more than two decades. Twitter: @jayanthjacob. Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.