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Mr Trump’s post is disappointing for India

〰️Shashi Tharoor 

Mr Trump’s post is disappointing for India in four important ways:

♦️ First, it implies a false equivalence between the victim and the perpetrator, and seemingly overlooks the US’ own past unwavering stance against Pakistan’s well-documented links to cross-border terrorism. 

♦️Second, it offers Pakistan a negotiating framework which it certainly has not earned. India will never negotiate with a terrorist gun pointed at its head. 

♦️Third, it “internationalises” the Kashmir dispute, an obvious objective of the terrorists. India rejects the idea of a dispute and sees the problem as an internal affair of India’s. India has never requested, not is likely to seek, any foreign country’s mediation over its problems with Pakistan. 

♦️And fourth, it “re-hyphenates” India and Pakistan in the global imagination. For decades now, world leaders had been encouraged not to club their visits to India with visits to Pakistan, and starting with President Clinton in 2000, no US President had done so. This is a major backward step.

✔️How do you mediate between killers and their victims? How do you mediate between people who have been systematically for 30 years dispatching terrorists to kill ordinary innocent civilians and those whose job it is to protect these civilians?

✔️The problem with mediation is that it doesn't work. What will work is if Pakistan dismantles its terror infrastructure, abandons the path of confrontation, and chooses peaceful coexistence with its neighbours on the subcontinent. Right now, as Voltaire once said about Prussia — it’s not a state with an army, but an army with a state.

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