“Our eastern neighbour, having suffered a humiliating defeat in the conflict in May last year, has increasingly resorted to covert tactics and the use of proxies in an attempt to undermine the hard-earned peace and stability in our country.” Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was not preaching to the choir at the Pakistan Naval Academy. His warning, thus, served as a reminder that the subcontinent’s temperature is rising even when the guns are silent.
There are, once again, rumours of efforts to break the ice between Islamabad and New Delhi. Whether Track 2 or Track 1.5, any development that promises even a modest lowering of temperatures between the two nuclear neighbours deserves to be taken seriously. Yet the test of any thaw is not the photograph, the handshake or the carefully leaked possibility of talks. At the end of the day, it is conduct. India cannot speak the language of normalisation while trying to turn every Pakistani vulnerability into leverage.
The pattern is now too clear to miss. On the eastern front, Pakistan accuses India of using proxies after failing to impose its will through open conflict. On the western front, former Afghan president Hamid Karzai has reappeared with the old Kabul-New Delhi script, blaming Pakistan for fires that permissive spaces in Afghanistan have helped feed. This is the same Karzai who signed Afghanistan’s strategic partnership pact with India and spent years assuring Pakistan that it was harmless.
Then there is water. India’s effort to keep the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance is not a technical dispute. When Indian ministers speak of ensuring that “not a single drop” flows towards Pakistan, they are not debating clauses. They are weaponising geography, even as the Permanent Court of Arbitration sides with Islamabad and international law puts its foot down on the unilateral suspension of a treaty that has survived wars.
Nor has Pakistan’s diplomatic success on the US-Iran track escaped this hostility. The Islamabad MoU, instead of being judged on whether it reduced a wider regional fire, has been targeted by Indian propaganda because it dents a preferred narrative: that Pakistan is isolated, reckless and diplomatically irrelevant. A country helping others step back from war is harder to sell as the region’s permanent villain.
As always, these pages would urge those standing at the helm to put their best foot forward and let undeniable evidence and international collaboration speak louder than political buzzwords. The mushrooming of sleeper cells in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, linked to the outlawed TTP and BLA, strengthens Islamabad’s case that Pakistan is not facing a random law-and-order challenge but a sponsored campaign meant to bleed the state by a thousand cuts. Peace remains the right course. But no one can expect Pakistan to walk towards it with its eyes closed. *