Gurdaspur attack must not scuttle the India-Pakistan Ufa dialogue process

Monday's terror attack in Punjab's Gurdaspur poses yet another challenge to normalisation of ties between India and Pakistan. Prima facie evidence, such as data from GPS devices carried by the well-trained and professional fedayeen terrorists, indicate they came from Pakistan. This illustrates India's familiar dilemma in dealing with Pakistan.

That the attack comes on the heels of the Ufa agreement where Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif decided to restart the dialogue process, reiterates the existence of inimical forces in Pakistan who want to scupper any engagement its civilian government might develop with India.
But neither is withdrawing from dialogue a solution.

Home minister Rajnath Singh has asserted that government wants peace with Pakistan but not at the cost of national honour, but with repetition this will become a trite saying. There's a limit to how much New Delhi can adopt the hardline approach; overplaying this card will only harden anti-India forces in Pakistan.

Of course, this doesn't mean that we shouldn't cultivate calibrated military responses to cross-border terrorism or firing across the border. In fact India needs to game scenarios like another terror attack on the scale of 26/11 and prepare contingency plans for how it will respond, putting aside resources in advance. But this must go hand in hand with a comprehensive dialogue process.

In this regard, the national security adviser-level talks should be broadened to establish as many contact points as feasible. And given its influence in that country, the Pakistan army must also be made part of the process.

There's no denying that it's Rawalpindi GHQ that really controls Islamabad's India policy. Hence, it makes sense to open direct and multi-layered channels of communication with the top and middle-level echelons of the Pakistan army. Simultaneously, India would do well to push Pakistan to jointly put in place a border management mechanism akin to the India-China one which has prevented violence along that border. Such a mechanism should have inbuilt clauses about how to address cross-border infiltration.

Since Islamabad denies it pushes in infiltrators it should be hard for Islamabad to refuse. India-Pakistan relations are frequently clouded by paranoia and misreading of each other's intentions. Instead of abandoning dialogue, New Delhi needs to broadbase the dialogue process to ensure that doesn't happen.