Welcome to The Political Fix by Rohan Venkataramakrishnan, a newsletter on Indian politics and policy. To get it in your inbox every week,...
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The Big Story: Cottoned on
Here are three long-standing bits of conventional wisdom regarding the India-Pakistan dispute and any potential peace process:
- We’re more likely to see a deal when India is being run by a right-wing, i.e. Bharatiya Janata Party leader – because they would be less susceptible to ‘weak-on-national security’ attacks.
- India won’t accept any third-party intervention, and will vehemently push back against any suggestion of mediation.
- There’s no point for New Delhi in engaging just with Pakistan’s civilian leaders. The Pakistan Army holds all the cards. If its top brass can be convinced, the civilian leadership won’t get in the way.
Each of these has plenty of truth to them, yet over the years there have been plenty of reasons to prise apart some of the underlying assumptions behind them.
It is true, for example, that the decades-old dispute appeared to come close to some semblance of a resolution under former Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the country’s...
