'If Pakistan Behaves Well, India's Hand Is Extended And Open'

The government’s stance that talks and terror will not go hand in hand earns a huge endorsement

- Sandeep Unnithan

"If Pakistan behaves well, India’s hand is extended and open,” said former foreign secretary S. Jaishankar, responding to a question after a lecture in July last year. Jaishankar is now India’s foreign minister. It would suffice to say that what he said then continues to be India’s present policy under the Narendra Modi government 2.0. Pakistan has not behaved well and India’s hand is a balled fist.

The policy that ‘talks and terror cannot go hand in hand’ started soon after the January 2016 attack on Pathankot and cross-border commando raids, resulting in the killing of 14 soldiers at Uri in 2017. On February 14 this year, a suicide bomb attack on a CRPF convoy by a Jaish-e-Mohammed militant killed 40 troopers. The attack drew a swift response—an unprecedented bombing of a training camp in Balakot in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province by IAF jets.

The January 2019 Mood of the Nation (MOTN) survey had showed a poll-bound Bharatiya Janata Party on the backfoot with mounting pressure from the economy and rural distress and because of the opposition’s attempts to rake up corruption allegations in the Rafale fighter aircraft deal. However, post-Pulwama and Balakot, the BJP made national security one of its major electoral planks and returned to power with more seats than it had won in 2014.