By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

India and Pakistan Engage in Diplomatic Blitz

India’s strikes against Pakistan should be seen as part of a long-term plan. India and the United Kingdom sign a long-awaited free trade agreement, and former Bangladeshi Prime Minister Khaleda Zia’s return home raises questions about her son’s political future.

Soldiers monitor a busy commercial street in Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir, on June 2.

 

India and Pakistan’s Narrative Battle

This week, delegations from India and Pakistan are in the United States to seek support for their governments’ positions in the wake of their military conflict last month. Both governments have invested significant resources in the effort, which involves senior politicians and distinguished former diplomats.

India’s contingent, led by prominent opposition politician Shashi Tharoor, is emphasizing terrorism and Pakistan’s links to it. The Pakistani group, headed by former Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, is projecting Pakistan as an innocent and peaceful actor and India as an aggressor.

The opposing delegations are participating in a veritable diplomatic road show, stopping in multiple countries. Yet it’s worth asking why India and Pakistan feel the need to wage this battle of narratives at all. The conflict ended more than three weeks ago, and the diplomatic offensive takes policy bandwidth away from pressing matters at home, including economic stress.

It’s an especially apt question for India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is proud, nationalistic, and adamant about not wanting international involvement in India’s bilateral disputes. But it has dispatched seven delegations to 33 foreign capitals - including places such as Bogotá and Ljubljana that don’t appear to have significant stakes in India-Pakistan relations.

By contrast, Pakistan, which is sending two delegations to five capitals, has long courted international involvement and mediation, especially on the issue of Kashmir.

Each government has strong motivations to carry out a diplomatic blitz in this case. A key target audience is the one back home, and both India and Pakistan will seek domestic political gains. The government in Islamabad, which isn’t very popular, can amplify its message of Pakistani innocence and Indian aggression by taking it abroad.

Modi’s government, which enjoys ample popularity, can further bolster support at home by projecting its efforts as multi-partisan: The members of India’s delegation are indeed drawn from multiple parties. (Those in Pakistan’s delegation are, too, but they exclude members of the popular opposition Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party).

Additionally, each country has concrete and urgent asks of the international community. Pakistan seeks global support following India’s ongoing suspension of the World Bank-brokered Indus Waters Treaty, which could in due course imperil Pakistan’s already-precarious water security. India wants Pakistan’s bilateral and multilateral donors to reduce assistance to Islamabad.

Furthermore,  India is playing a long game, looking to do more over time to raise the costs of Pakistan not acting more expeditiously to curb anti-India terrorists and infrastructure on its soil. This entails new nonmilitary punitive steps - and now, a more robust diplomatic strategy to try to convince the world to reduce engagement with Pakistan.

Finally, India wants to reverse what it sees as a problematic trend that has emerged from its military clashes with Pakistan in 2016, 2019, and last month: With each side using increasing amounts of conventional force, the international community has focused more on concerns about nuclear escalation than on the terrorist attacks that triggered the hostilities. New Delhi wants to refocus global attention on terror.

India and Pakistan will struggle to secure all the support that they seek. India can count on global sympathy for its terrorism concerns - and in many Western capitals, for its allegations of Pakistani links to terrorism. But New Delhi can’t ease the world’s fears of nuclear escalation. That will help Islamabad, which aims to play up those fears and even redirect the focus toward worries about terrorism on its soil, for which it alleges Indian sponsorship.

But Pakistan’s play to demonize India will bump up against the fact that much of the world views India as an important strategic and commercial partner. That makes countries hesitant to embrace Islamabad’s pitch for global mediation on Kashmir, a position rejected by New Delhi.

Eventually, each government will need to convince its respective public that it won the narrative battle. That will help determine whether Indians and Pakistanis come to view their delegations’ efforts as a textbook example of successful diplomacy - or a pointless junket.

 

 

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