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India's Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna (3rd R) holds talks with Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi (4th L) at the Foreign Ministry in Islamabad July 15, 2010. Pakistani and Indian foreign ministers met on Thursday in an effort to revive peace talks broken off after the Mumbai assault, although no one is expecting any breakthrough given lingering distrust between the old rivals. (Reuters/B.K.Bangash/Pool)
The foreign ministers of India and Pakistan have returned home, licking their wounds from their latest failed engagement. Both sides are blaming each other for not only failing to make any progress, but also souring ties further, with Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and his Indian counterpart S.M.Krishna openly sparring at a news conference following the talks in Islamabad. Qureshi suggested Krishna did not seem to have the full mandate to conduct negotiations because directions were being given from New Delhi throughout the day-long talks, drawing rebuke from India which said the foreign minister had been insulted on Pakistani soil.
Some people are asking why bother going through this painful exercise at this time when the chances of of the two sides making even the slightest concession are next to zero? India and Pakistan may actually be doing each other more damage by holding these high-profile, high-pressure meetings where the domestic media and the opposition in both the countries is watching for the slightest sign of capitulation by either government.
It’s the world’s longest running soap opera, made for great television viewing, says a blog on the Indian National Interest. “These events have become the drivers of the process each such opportunity attracting saturated media coverage and intense public scrutiny in both countries.”
And these are only talks about what to talk about since they can’t even agree on whether terrorism should be front and centre of the dialogue as New Delhi wants or the row over Kashmir be given top billing as Pakistan wants. ”If anything, the precarious relationship between India and Pakistan deteriorated after the countries’ two foreign ministers haggled in day-long sessions on July 15 – not over substance but over what issues they would discuss and when they would discuss them,” argues Michael Hughes in the Huffington Post
That’s pretty much been the the way the implacable foes have approached each public engagement for several decades except for bursts of high-powered diplomacy such as Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee riding the first bus service between New Delhi to Lahore in 1999 in a dramatic gesture to breach the walls of distrust that some compared to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s trip to Israel. Some of us who followed Vajpayee to the impenetrable border thought history was being made and that the whole India-Pakistan narrative was being transformed. But, as has happened so often in the past, Vajpayee’s peace-making ended in spectacular failure when three months later his government confronted hundreds of thousands of fighters backed by the Pakistani army who had occupied India’s part of Kashmir.
Two years later,Vajpayee made a second bold move for peace inviting President Pervez Musharraf for talks in Agra, the city of the Taj Mahal, to try and find a way to end half a century of animosity and get the two countries to live at peace with each other. Those marathon talks, again under the harsh glare of the media camped outside the hotel where they met, ended in failure with a bitterly disappointed Musharraf - who was equally determined in his pursuit of peace – leaving for home in the dead of the night with barely a goodbye. Again, if you were there that night, you couldn’t help thinking tthat the burden of expectations ultimately proved too much for the two unlikely peace-makers – Vajpayee a dyed-in-the-wool Hindu nationalist leader and Musharraf, a military general who had fought Indian forces.
In hindsight then, the only times when the two countries have made real progress and even coming close to a breakthrough on Kashmir, have been when high-powered interlocutors have held talks away from the public eye, often in third countries. Three years ago these interlocutors were nearly ready to deliver a deal on Kashmir that has kept them apart for 60 years but political instability in Pakistan leading to Musharraf’s resignation dashed all hopes. Again it was done in secret and these details are only now coming out. Which only goes to show that the only way the neighbours can overcome the “trust deficit” is to conduct negotiations under the radar, allowing them to explore a range of options including those they wold flinch from in the public glare. It also gives their governments the cover of plausible deniability.
At the moment, the two sides seem so far apart, though, that even a worthwhile Track Two engagement seem a bridge too far. New evidence has emerged that Pakistan’s ISI was involved in the Mumbai assault of 2008, Indian officials said based on the interrogation of Pakistan- American David Headley who has pleaded guilty to working with the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba to plan the attacks. Indeed, a top Indian official went public with the claims, just ahead of the foreign ministers talks, effectively sealing their fate.
Which begs the question why Delhi went through the talks in the first place ? “ Outside of the obvious attempt to assuage U.S. leaders, the biggest riddle is why India would ever agree to meet with Pakistan to discuss issues of trust in the first place, when India now has definitive proof in hand that Pakistan’s intelligence agency, army and navy were in league with the hateful Islamic jihadist group responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks that led to the deaths of 173 people.” Hughes says.
Equally, the mood is hardening on the other side of the border. Pakistan, as I wrote in this analysis, is the main power broker in the quickening search for a political settlement of the Afghan conflict, leaving India counting its losses after investing blood and treasure. The military led by General Ashfaq Kayani, who has just been given a rare three-year extension, is no mood to compromise with India as it seizes the upper hand in Afghanistan.
“India must awaken to the reality that Pakistan’s army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani smells blood and thinks he can knock India out of the box in Afghanistan and he certainly isn’t going to wait for the trust talks to come to fruition. The U.S. desperately needs Pakistan – evidenced by the mad cash the U.S. has dished out – and Kayani knows this and is going to make sure Pakistan has a foothold in Kabul when the dust settles. It’s a good wager the wise General isn’t going to let a minor issue impede progress, including the fact that Pakistan’s entire armed forces have been implicated in a terror plot,” Hughes wrote.
Is it time then to inter the India-Pakistan dialogue, at least in its current, theatrical form ? ”There are too many layers to the Indo-Pak engagement on both sides of the border. The process as we understand it today — driven by events and personalities — is not only a non-starter but akin to a proverbial dead horse. When you are riding a dead horse, buying a stronger whip or greater riding ability won’t help it move forward. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase the speed or asserting that “This is the way we always have ridden this horse” won’t help either, ” says the Indian National Interest. “It is time for India to dismount this dead horse.”
Source: TAJ
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• Your thesis, in one sentence.
• The relevance (timeliness, importance, etc.) of your thesis.
• Three contextual “proof points” that help illustrate why your thesis is right.
While the selective enforcement of law against a black man is regretable, it is regretable not because the victim was black or a man, but because the law was enforced selectively.
Although the suffering of African Americans must never be minimised, it would be a pity if they made a separate peace with the white man, rather than fighting for equal treatment under law for all victims of discrimination.
It is discrimination and lack of recourse to justice that breeds violence
Following his endorsement of Barack Obama, in his 19 October 2008 interview with Tom Brokaw on NBC’s Meet the Press, Colin Powell described the widespread anti-Muslim prejudice in America, and his vision of how things should be:
I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America.
Clearly, Colin Powell is not just a great African-American, he is a great man. Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. would do well to emulate him and widen the scope of his efforts
restore equal treatment under law
============
There is outrage in America over the 16 July 2009 arrest (for “disorderly conduct”) of Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., “a man who was one of TIME’s 25 most influential Americans in 1997,” for the time-honoured crime of “failure of a black to show proper deference to a white police officer.” One commentator recalls Malcolm X: “What do you call a black man with a PhD? A nigger;” another
Gates has been quoted as saying:
“I thought the whole idea that America was post-racial and post-black was laughable from the beginning…
…the only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in a very nice house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Paradoxically, the outrage is not over the selective enforcement of the law, but over race being the basis for this selective enforcement.
This is understandable given the history of race relations in America and the brouhaha over Barack Obama’s being in the White House. Ironically, however, by privileging race over prejudice in this incident, the critics endorse the silence over other kinds of prejudice that are equally deplorable.
Thus President Obama — who started off by joking that if he had tried to force the lock at the White House, “I’d get shot” — said that “the Cambridge police acted stupidly” and acknowledged that “there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.” But in saying this, Obama was not opposing disproportionate law enforcement; he was merely saying that African-Americans and Latinos should enjoy the same immunities and privileges that other (European-)Americans enjoy.
Americans, therefore, see themselves as white, anglo-saxon, and protestant (“WASP”); the corollary, unfortunately, has been a deep-rooted prejudice against blacks, Hispanics, and — since roughly the 1979 Iranian revolution — Muslims.
To Obama’s “fact” then we can add the shorter history of prejudice against Muslims, American and non-American, in what today is not only more virulent than racial or ethnic prejudice in America, but also enjoys widespread acceptability among white, black, anglo-saxon, and Hispanic non-Muslim Americans. Unlike Professor Gates, equally distinguished American Muslims today know better than to fail to show proper deference to their white fellow citizen or police officer. And, unlike the Gates affair, the victims of this prejudice like those of ante-bellum slavery are supported neither by public outrage nor by private protest.
While this is not intended to belittle by even an iota the violence that was done to Professor Gates, the point should be made that when we lament racial prejudice (or profiling), it is prejudice (or profiling) that we oppose, and not that we do so because it was based on race — with the implication that we might condone other kinds of prejudice (or profiling).
“What do you call a Muslim with a PhD? A terrorist”
To appreciate this fact, it is important to realise that despite the “nation of immigrants” rhetoric there is a latent distinction, as Huntington points out, between descendents of the early “settlers” who did not assimilate with the native Americans, to put it mildly; and later “immigrants,” who are expected to do so, to the extent permitted by their colour and ethnicity.
Also
Race and Reality in a Front-Porch Encounter
The Profiling of Sgt. Crowley
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