It is unbelievable to know that two countries with relations deeper than the seven seas and higher than the Mount Everest could get entangled in logger heads. Ever since Imran khan got selected into power, his foreign minister Shah Mahmud Qureshi has not been successful to muster the support of OIC countries to corner India over the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir .
Not only It has been failure of Islamabad’s policy to isolate India on Kashmir but also the passive role played by its appointed president of Azad Kashmir who has been a top foreign office bureaucrat, remained Pakistan’s Permanent representative to the United Nation’s General Assembly for many years and who got baptised himself as Sardar to command more respect from the local people.
Prime Minister Imran Khan, for reasons best known to him and his powerful linkages to Indian big business, had looked forward to having good relations with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. No sooner Modijee got re-elected as PM Imran Khan announced exuberantly that he was confident that he would be successful in doing business with him.
However, Imran Khan’s India narrative could not change Kashmir environment although American President Donald Trump often offered his good offices to help break the deadlock between India and Pakistan. While Imran Khan continued to find ways of wooing India, Prime Minister Modi went steps a head in changing Kashmir’s constitutional status that now allows non-Kashmiris right to acquire property ownership rights denied to them previously. It is now more than a year that Article 370 has been declared redundant by Modi government. Besides, in the more than a year long oppression by Indian forces has doubled.
It is, indeed, gross failure of Foreign Office and his diplomatic team that it could not pull its socks up to wake up the sleeping conscience of the OIC or the Ummah– call what one may-and seek an OIC resolution against India or mobilise its economic pressure on Delhi todefuse its oppression.
Situation has come to such a deplorable stage that people in Jammu and Kashmir State are losing hope but not their will to continue their fight with resilience. On the other hand, in Pakistan the PTI government sees more often junctures of gross embarrassments not by the opposition that is more accused of a friendly role as moment of embarrassment, not by any opposition attack, but volatile attacks from within its own ministers and party leaders. If one remembers only a few weeks back Science and Technology Minister Fawad Chaudhry, opened a tirade of strong words against the leadership of the party pulling its undergarments down with biting criticism on the main party leadership questioning most bitterly his PTI bandwagoners for their gross failure to put respectable clothing to the naked vision of Prime Minister Imran Khan. Likewise the other colleague known as Sheeda Tully too took the wind out of the sails of PTI government.
It is, indeed, gross failure of Foreign Office and his diplomatic team that it could not pull its socks up to wake up the sleeping conscience of the OIC or the Ummah– call what one may-and seek an OIC resolution against India or mobilise its economic pressure on Delhi to defuse its oppression
Last in the round of the Ministerial dog fight is between Federal Minister for Human Rights Dr Shireen Mazari who has made her mark as an outspoken member of PTI government. She does not hesitate in calling a spade a spade even if it is not. In this case of her shout out, her guns have rightly targeted the occupants of Hotel Sherzade for what she calls – “letting down the Kashmiris and (Prime Minister) Imran Khan by not taking his nuanced narrative forward and merely resorting to traditional diplomacy”.
Dr Mazari right earnestly believes in promoting a proactive foreign policy by its ministry and its officials. One was shocked to hear from her at a seminar on Kashmir in Islamabad the other day, that ” the FO could not take up the Kashmir case effectively at international levels in the post-August 5 scenario when the Indian government abrogated its constitutional terms revoking India-held Kashmir’s autonomy and statehood.”
Dr Mazari who always carries substantive weight in foreign policy here without offering any viable ideas and strategies, charged the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of allegedly practicing outdated diplomatic tools ‘obsolete with unidimensional approach in their Kashmir plans which neither worked in the past, nor now in the age of information technology and social media’.
I am one of those who liked Shah Mehmood Qureshi as a suave minister. I also liked his itch for home work. Usually criticism of a minister by another amounts to criticism of the prime minister.
I had suggested when he was selected as Foreign Minister that he would be like a square peg in a wrong hole. His qualifications and experience would have made a very competent food and agriculture minister. His personal preference came about because of his eye for the prime ministerial job. So far he has missed the boat while Ms Mazari does not forget to praise the prime minister’s relentless efforts for raising the Kashmir issue on every possible international platform “. If we see the chart of diplomatic efforts and their outcome, we see that the issue was taken up at the UNSC twice, and at OIC’s Kashmir group a few times. The only capitals that the poor internationalization of the Kashmir issue is the government’s failure.
I, indeed, agree with Ms Mazari that the government’s foreign policy lacks a rightful trajectory. It needs a new narrative on Kashmir. It has to be given a new approach and given a new push and instead of taking the issue with other government functionaries in their plush offices and in seminar speeches, it is the time to take up the plights of Kashmiris through cultural exchanges, and updating civil society activists in other countries. PTI has outdone others in the professional use or abuse of social media but unfortunately social media has not been fully utilized to raise the Kashmiris’ voice. This is, indeed, the time the government devised its agenda and policy at multidimensional levels to underscore the misery of the Kashmiris.
The writer is former High Commissioner of Pakistan to UK and a veteran journalist