Pakistan’s foreign minister, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, arrived in Goa on Thursday, the first visit to India by a senior Pakistani official in 12 years.
Yet few held out hope that the trip signalled efforts for reconciliation between the two neighbours and rivals. Speaking as he boarded the plane to Goa, where India is chairing the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) council of foreign ministers on Friday morning, Bhutto Zardari emphasised that his presence would be “focused exclusively on SCO” and avoided any mention of India.
Meanwhile, the Indian minister of external affairs, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, held sideline bilateral meetings with China’s foreign minister, Qin Gang, and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, on Thursday but nothing was scheduled with Bhutto Zardari.
According to an Indian media report, Pakistan had requested a bilateral meeting but it was turned down, though this was later denied by an anonymous Pakistani official.
Relations between Bhutto Zardari and Jaishankar had already become publicly acrimonious at the UN security council meeting in New York in December last year, after Jaishankar’s speech directly criticised Pakistan for “supporting cross border terrorism”. Bhutto Zardari responded by referring to Modi as “the butcher of Gujarat”, a reference to the Indian prime minister’s alleged complicity in communal riots in Gujarat state in 2002.
The long-running rivalry between India and Pakistan, who have gone to war four times since 1947, has shown little signs of abating. Relations sank to historic lows in February 2019 after India carried out an airstrike in Pakistan. In response Pakistan shot down an Indian warplane and took the pilot hostage.
Six months later, hostility between the two nuclear-armed neighbours further rose when the Indian government, led by the prime minister, Narendra Modi, unilaterally revoked the autonomy of Kashmir, the disputed state which is split between India and Pakistan. Pakistan saw it as a deliberate provocation by India and called it “illegal, unilateral, reckless and coercive”.
Though a ceasefire along the border that divides Pakistan-administered and Indian-administered Kashmir was reaffirmed in 2021, and has remained peaceful on both sides, India continues to accuse Pakistan of funding cross-border terrorism in the state and bilateral trade remains largely suspended between the two countries.
The rivalry with Pakistan has also played into the nationalist politics of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party, and ministers still make regular jibes. “We have a neighbour. Like we are experts in IT, they’re experts in international terrorists,” said Jaishankar last year. Pakistan hit back, calling the comments “highly irresponsible and gratuitous”.
Yet as Pakistan grapples with a worsening economic crisis, high inflation, food shortages and the lasting damage caused by ruinous floods which caused more than £24bn in damage, the rhetoric on India from the Pakistan side has been occasionally more conciliatory, in particular the possibility of reopening trade.
Speaking to the Guardian in an interview in October, the Pakistani prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, said he was “absolutely ready” to build up relations with India and there was “business to do on both sides”, but only if the Kashmir issue were discussed and resolved.
“India is our neighbour and it will be there forever, whether we like it or not,” said Sharif, in comments that have not been previously published. “We have scarce resources. So does India. Do we want to spend those resources in buying more ammunition, more military hardware, or using those scarce funds to strengthen our economies and to empower our nation and to alleviate unemployment, poverty, and so on and so forth? The choice is ours.”
Senior figures in Sharif’s government had also advocated opening up trade through the land border with India, particularly as the floods had devastated crops and sent prices soaring. Many have pointed to the China-India model, where even though the two nations are engaged in tense border hostilities, trade between the two countries now totals more than £107bn a year.
However, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs said in September it would maintain the status quo. India’s home minister, Amit Shah, was also derisive about suggestions the two sides should talk. “Some people say we should talk to Pakistan. Why should we talk to Pakistan? We will not talk,” Shah told a rally in October.
Among analysts, Bhutto Zardari’s motives for attending the SCO meeting in Goa are seen as less about relations with India and more about building Pakistan’s strategic regional interests at a time of disastrous economic turmoil and political instability at home; in particular attempting to reaffirm close ties with China, an important ally and regional counterweight to India, and building relations with Russia, which recently began selling cheap oil to Pakistan.
Nusrat Javed, a senior analyst, said China was the only reason that Pakistan was attending the meeting. “I don’t see any cravings from India to normalise the relations with Pakistan at this point of time. Next year, India has elections and Modi has a constituency of hyper-nationalists so there is no political motivation there,” he said.
