How would you characterise the India-Pakistan bilateral relations today? A. The initiation of peace process with Pakistan is one of the best things that has happened to our foreign policy. Now you can go into various factors which led to this; one could be that Pakistanis always considered India at par and the effort was to equalise the disadvantage of size and strength through their alliances. But I think post1998, Pakistan has begun to realise that India has a different trajectory, and Pakistan had to look after its own vital interests.
Q. Siachen and Sir Creek are two of the eight subjects of the composite dialogue. Do you think they can be quickly resolved? A. Unfortunately, both sides have dug in their heels on some of these issues and they look a little intractable at this moment but I would say since Pakistan is accepting that we can normalise relations, more or less, following the Chinese model of keeping difficult issues in a separate box and normalising in other areas.
Now quite clearly Kashmir is an issue that can’t be resolved overnight, so why not go forward on other issues, like trade, people-topeople exchanges, a liberal visa policy.
Q. How is India’s foreign policy shaping up? Are we focusing too much on the proposed civil nuclear cooperation with the US at the expense of other regions or issues? A. As I see our foreign policy of the last 60 years, one of our problems has been that we have not been able to focus on more than one issue at a time. If we are going one way, we are neglecting another. Now the realisation has come that the foreign policy cannot be sequential. You cannot say that in the next five years we will deal with Africa, and then we will go to Latin America. It has to be simultaneous.
Do you feel a need of rationalising Indian missions in some of these regions? A. Absolutely. We have muddled along with a tiny foreign service; we have managed, but I think it is clear that it will become unmanageable in the future.
We need to have the manpower for various missions that we have established.
We must strengthen both the ministry of external affairs and our missions abroad.