There have been several commentaries critical of Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi’s decision to make the terror factories of the Pakistan army the core of the discussions in Goa of the BRICS partners. In particular, what has been pointed out has been China’s refusal to even include Pakistan-based terror groups in the final declaration, even though other such organisations were. Had India refused to go along with the latter course, the country most offended would have been Russia, which is battling such groups in West Asia. Of course, Moscow refused to go along with New Delhi in naming either Pakistan or groups based in that country in the final declaration issued at the close of the BRICS summit. This was not a surprise, given that Beijing was totally opposed to any such course, and given the international circumstances of an attempted throttling of Russia’s economy by the US and the EU through the harshest of sanctions ever imposed on Russia, it would have been unrealistic to expect Vladimir Putin to go against the stand of Xi Jinping. What is a surprise is the fact that several in the Indian contingent seemed surprised at this. Such a reaction leads to the question of what exactly the “sherpas” to the summit were doing. These worthies are intended to study the ground and ensure that their principals (in this case, Prime Minister Modi) do not take any step that would be far away from a consensus, and certainly not a move which would result in a rejection by the other four leaders, as took place in the case of the suggestion that Pakistan be included in the final statement. Whoever were the sherpas for the BRICS conference, they need to be held to account for an entirely avoidable diplomatic embarrassment caused by the contretemps. It should have been clear from preliminary soundings that Beijing was not prepared to abandon its longstanding (and self-defeating) embrace of the Pakistan military, and to expect otherwise was to be unrealistic. The BRICS forum operates on the basis of consensus, and the sherpas chosen by the Prime Minister to represent our country’s interests and views in discussions preparatory to the 2016 BRICS summit ought to have reported back as to the limits of consensus that could be expected at Goa rather than leading top policymakers in India into adopting positions obviously not shared in public, at least by any other partner.
However, Prime Minister Modi was justified in placing the problem of Pakistan at the heart of the Goa conclave. It is inexcusable for a country to make terror the centrepiece of its policy towards a neighbour, the way Pakistan has done since 1947, the year in which it was created by the retreating British as a means of ensuring chaos on the subcontinent. It was no accident that the creation of Pakistan led to the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and to misery suffered by tens of millions of innocents. All this while the Colonial Office in London justified the move as being needed to “save lives”. A more recent example comes to mind, Benghazi in 2011, where the US-UK-France coalition stepped in “to save lives at Benghazi” and predictably cost huge numbers of casualties, as well as created a failed state out of what had been a reasonably stable and prosperous Libya. However, had the sherpas given an accurate or a complete picture of the situation, it may have been the case that diplomacy on Pakistan was conducted far more outside the public gaze than it was. Throughout the Goa summit, the fanfare in the media was about how Pakistan was isolated. Indeed it was, in private. Even China understands the incongruity of its support for a terror factory masquerading as a professional military. However, in public Beijing has once again stood by its feckless and reckless ally. Prime Minister Modi has emerged creditably out of the Goa conclave for his steadfast commitment to battling terror and his call for a global alliance against terror, including that which is state sponsored. In later meetings, it is anticipated that there will be changes in the public behaviour of Beijing and therefore Moscow on Pakistan, the “mother ship” of terror. Goa was a pointer to Beijing that it cannot any more coddle the terror factories in Pakistan without any blowback to itself from states such as India, Iran and Afghanistan that are enduring the effects of such depredators.