Pakistan’s ties with India in Imran Khan years: Just as acrimonious as ever

It was in the winter of 2015 that Khan made his last visit to New Delhi

Notwithstanding his newfound and somewhat baffling love for India, the relation between New Delhi and Islamabad during Imran Khan’s tenure as the Prime Minister of Pakistan was just as acrimonious as it had been in the past. As he quietly and unceremoniously exited the Prime Minister’s office just a few minutes before being dethroned by a late-night no-trust vote in the National Assembly of Pakistan on Saturday, the relationship between the two nations is at its lowest, with diplomatic missions of both the nations in each other’s capital functioning with bare minimum staff and without High Commissioners at the hjelms.

It was the winter of 2015 when Khan had his last visit to New Delhi. He was still a cricket legend for many in India, although his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) was by then 19-year-old and had emerged over the previous few months as a potent threat to Prime Minister M Nawaz Sharif’s government across the border. Sharif and Prime Minister Narendra Modi had already held three meetings – first during the swearing-in ceremony of the new Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in New Delhi in May 2014 and the last during the COP 21 climate summit in Paris just a few days before the PTI chief had come on a tour to India. Modi’s then External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had just returned from Islamabad after she and her counterpart, Sharif’s advisor on foreign affairs, Sartaj Aziz, had just announced resumption of the Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue, which had remained suspended since January 2013. So, the importance of having an engagement with the emerging leader of the neighbouring country was not lost on the Ministry of External Affairs and the Prime Minister’s Office in New Delhi. So, Khan’s request for a courtesy meeting with Modi was readily accepted.

They “welcomed the recent developments in bilateral relations and expressed the hope that these would lead to closer cooperative ties between the two countries,” according to a press-release issued by the PMO after the meeting on December 11, 2015. The PTI chairman invited the Prime Minister of India to visit Pakistan. A couple of weeks later, Modi did make a “surprise visit” to Lahore, not to meet Khan, but to greet Sharif on his birthday and to attend the wedding ceremony of the granddaughter of the Prime Minister of Pakistan.

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The hope that the “recent developments in bilateral relations” might lead to a détente was however shattered soon, as five Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorists sneaked into India from Pakistan on the next New Year’s Eve, carried out an attack on the Indian Air Force base in Pathankot in Punjab from January 1 and killed a civilian and seven men-in-uniforms in a five-day-long mayhem before being neutralized by the security personnel. This was followed by two terror strikes at Pampore in J&K on February 22 and June 25, with the Indian Army losing 11 of its soldiers. Then came the killing of 21 soldiers in attack on the Indian Army’s brigade headquarters at Uri in J&K on September 18, 2016 and the retaliatory “surgical strike” by India on terror camps in Pakistan eight days later. India boycotted the SAARC summit, which was to be hosted by Pakistan in November 2016. So did the other nations, forcing the Pakistan Government to call it off.

So, by the time Khan took the office of the Prime Minister in Islamabad on August 18, 2018 with the blessing of the all-powerful Pakistan Army, the peace-balloon Modi wanted to fly with Sharif had been punctured and left in tatters.

New Delhi, however, did reach out to the new head of the government in Islamabad. Just days after the PTI emerged as the largest political party in the National Assembly of Pakistan, Modi called Khan, congratulated him and expressed hope that democracy would take deeper roots in Pakistan. The Prime Minister “reiterated his vision for peace and development in the entire neighbourhood”. Ajay Bisaria, who was then New Delhi’s envoy to Islamabad, called on him and gifted the former all-rounder a bat with autographs of all the players of the cricket team of India. Khan told Bisaria that he looked forward to hosting Modi and the leaders of other South Asian nations to Islamabad to end the impasse over the SAARC and host the long-pending 19th summit of the eight-nation-bloc. A few weeks after taking over as the Prime Minister on August He also wrote to Modi on September 14, 2018, proposing a meeting between the foreign ministers to set the stage for resumption of the bilateral dialogue as the two sides had agreed upon in December 2015, but had again been stalled due to the series of terror attacks in India in 2016. The Modi Government, however, was cautious in responding to overtures from Pakistan, as the parliamentary polls in India were just a few months away.

Then the tension between the two nations escalated again over the attack on India’s paramilitary soldiers at Pulwama in J&K by the Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist outfit of Pakistan on February 14, 2019 and the retaliatory strike by the Indian Air Force on a terror camp in Balakot deep inside Pakistan 14 days later. A few weeks after winning a second term in the Prime Minister’s office in New Delhi, Modi on August 5, 2019 led his government to strip Jammu and Kashmir off its special status and reorganize the State into two Union Territories – a move, which prompted Khan, his Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi and the rest of his government launch a global campaign against India. Pakistan also got its “iron brother” China to make several attempts to bring the issue of J&K back on the agenda of the United Nations Security Council, although other permanent members of the body blocked such moves. Khan raised the issue of J&K in his addresses to the UN General Assembly in 2019, 2020 and 2021, accusing the Government of India of not only trampling the human rights of people of J&K, but also resorting to a genocidal campaign and sponsoring Islamophobia. New Delhi often deployed its junior diplomats to counter Pakistan Prime Minister’s diatribes against India, often turning the table on him, slamming his government for failing to curb export of terror to the neighbourhood and beyond as well as to protect the minority communities in his country from persecution.

Islamabad in August 2019 made New Delhi withdraw Bisaria, India’s High Commissioner to Pakistan, in the wake of the Modi Government’s decision on J&K. Pakistan also did not send its newly-appointed High Commissioner to India, Moin-ul-Haq, to New Delhi. The High Commissions of India and Pakistan in each other’s capitals were left to be headed by acting envoys. Less than a year later, India and Pakistan in June 2020 downgraded diplomatic relations between the two nations, withdrawing half of the officials posted in the High Commissions of the respective countries in each other’s capitals.

The opening of the ‘Kartarpur Corridor’ in November 2019 to allow pilgrims from India to visit the gurdwara in Pakistan and the February 2021 deal between the armed forces of the two nations to stop firing at across the Line of Control (LoC) and strictly adhere to the 2003 ceasefire agreement were among the few “positives” that India and Pakistan could achieve during the prime-ministerial tenure of Khan.

Khan in March 2021 made some peace-overtures to New Delhi, but it was a non-starter, as he added the rider of Modi Government rolling back its August 5, 2019 decisions on J&K. Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, the chief of the Pakistan Army, too sent out some conciliatory messages to New Delhi around the same time, but the Modi Government did not see any credible sign of a strategic shift in the traditional approach of the neighbouring country’s ‘deep state’ towards India.

Just days before his ignominious ouster from the office of the Prime Minister, Khan discovered in himself an ardent admirer of India. As he desperately tried to save himself and his government from the no-confidence motion initiated by the opposition parties in the country’s National Assembly, Khan alleged that the move to oust him from the office of the Prime Minister was in fact a foreign conspiracy. He and his ministers went on to allege that the United States did not want him to continue as the head of the Government of Pakistan, because, according to the narrative the PTI sought to build, he refused to go by the diktats from Washington D.C. on many issues, including the one to cancel his visit to Moscow on February 24 – the day Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine. He showered praise on India for pursuing “independent foreign policy” and for resisting pressure from the United States and other western nations to buy oil from sanctions-hit Russia.

It was not lost on anyone though that Khan’s applause for the Government of India was less about sending a peace message to Modi and more about building a campaign narrative for the next elections by projecting himself as a victim of a “foreign conspiracy” and as someone, who was being “punished” by the opposition for standing up to a “foreign superpower”.

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