Can India's MP Missions Shift Global View on Pakistan Threat?

The Hindu

2 days ago

Published : Jun 03, 2025 14:18 IST - 8 MINS READ
The seven MPs' delegations the Narendra Modi government has despatched to some 32 countries worldwide include some of the best and most articulate of our Members of Parliament. They have proceeded to their respective destinations with detailed briefings by the Foreign Secretary and loads of background papers. Yet, a number of questions remain about what exactly they are supposed to accomplish.
The capital cities the delegations are visiting have been diligently chosen, concentrating on those member-States who are permanent members and either currently elected or prospectively elected to serve the next term as non-permanent members of the UN Security Council (UNSC). However, one serving non-permanent member, and the one who will be the most vocal in the UNSC, has been deliberately excluded—Pakistan.
We have had virtually no contact with the Pakistan government in the last 11 years that the Modi government has been in office. For the last six years, we have not even had High Commissioners in place in Islamabad or New Delhi. This renders it more, not less, relevant that we should have at least tried to compensate for the decade's absence of governmental contact by promoting parliamentary contact. It would have generated invaluable information of what to expect from the Pakistani onslaught at the UN.
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Moreover, none of our immediate neighbours in South Asia is scheduled to be visited. Such exclusions raise eyebrows as one would have thought they would be mobilised under our government's 'Neighbourhood First' policy to present a united regional front to the international community. Doubtless they are not on the parliamentarians' itinerary because none of them has openly and unambiguously come out in our support despite being the most informed, and most affected by, war in their vicinity. If our neighbours are not persuaded, what hope is there of distant Panama even beginning to understand our argument?
Making a bilateral issue multilateral
By prioritising the existing and potential UNSC members for acquainting them with the issues at stake, are we not multilateralising issues that Indira Gandhi had ensured at Shimla in 1972 would be limited to bilateral settlement? Is that not the principal reason that, for half a century, the international community has not agitated the Jammu and Kashmir issue in the UN despite the question being on the UN's agenda?
True, there have often been clashes between Indian and Pakistani representatives in international forums, but by and large, the permanent members have kept themselves off the substance of the issues and limited themselves to urging both countries to use bilateral channels to address outstanding bilateral issues, as mandated by the Simla Agreement of July 1972. This we have failed to do, especially since the seismic 2014 general election.
From scanty news reports on the reception being accorded to our MPs, it would also appear that while they are pressing our case with whoever chooses to meet them, few of their interlocutors are of sufficient influence to determine the stand these countries' representatives will take in the UN. More worryingly, these reports do not carry any ringing endorsement of our point of view.
Of course, they do deplore terrorism, but specifically, has any of them gone public about Pakistan-sponsored, Pakistan-supported, Pakistan-financed, or Pakistan-armed terrorism? And were they to do so, what answer would our delegations, constrained by the briefings they have received, give to difficult questions such as: how could we not intercept the terrorists deep on our side of the Line of Control? And why have we apprehended none of them a whole month and more after they committed their dastardly deed? And as three of the six alleged terrorists are Kashmiris, does this reflect 'normalisation'?
Even if many of those interacting with our MPs know little of India-Pakistan relations, most would want to know the outcome of the first air battle ever between highly sophisticated Western aircraft like Rafale and little-known Chinese military aircraft. Would they be satisfied, as Indians apparently are, by being blandly told that 'losses are expected in combat' and detailed information will be made available at the 'right time'? Even assuming that our MPs have been vouchsafed the information of our losses, can they share such information with foreigners while it is being denied to Indians? Will our interlocutors not feel short-changed at their distinguished visitors not imparting to them the vital military information they seek, perhaps even to evaluate for themselves how far China has developed in advanced military technology vis-à-vis the West?
The nuclear option
And will the absence of answers from the Indian MPs make them wary of the answers they get about the one question on which our interlocutors are anxious to satisfy themselves: the nuclear weapons option? After all, even the US Vice President J.D. Vance was distancing himself from involvement so long as it was a question of India acting against cross-border terrorism. But the moment we went beyond terrorist camps in Pakistan and escalated to attacking Pakistan airbases, President Donald Trump took upon himself the task of knocking Indian and Pakistani heads together to halt the escalatory prospect before it crossed the nuclear threshold.
But so long as Operation Sindoor remains open-ended—and not terminated—the possibility remains of another terror attack provoking a resumption of armed conflict at a level higher than what Uri and Pathankot or Pulwama and Pahalgam provoked and taking the world closer to a nuclear confrontation. At that point, the issue remains no longer bilateral but of global concern, for any use of nuclear weapons will have global consequences not limited to national frontiers. Little practical purpose is served by our MPs intoning parrot-like that we will not succumb to Pakistani 'nuclear blackmail'.
'The real measure of the MPs' success or failure would ensuring that cross-border terrorism, and not the threat of nuclear war, is the core issue.'
And let us not forget that Pakistan is not sitting with its hands folded. Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto is leading a seven-member delegation of diplomatic and military experts to some of the key capitals our MPs are visiting. In these cities, the Bhutto team will receive a careful and informed hearing. The Pakistani experts are well versed in diplomacy and, unlike our parliamentarians, with no constraints on answering the questions put to them. The very frankness of their replies—contrasting with our reticence—will enable them to carry the day with at least some of those with whom they interact.
They will tend to endorse Trump's claim to have successfully intervened in bringing the fighting to a halt. We will have a difficult time explaining that it was not Trump's threats to cease trade with us both, but our taking out of Pakistan's air force bases that led to Pakistan's Director General of Military Operations suing for an end to hostilities; that it was bilateralism and not third party intervention that carried the day.
Cross-border terror as core issue
While most of the countries being visited will take their cue at the UN from the prevailing general atmosphere there, many will focus on the nuclear option. Will they accept that the core issue is cross-border terrorism rather than the threat of nuclear war? Will they not want to know whether keeping Operation Sindoor open-ended does not mean Pakistan reserving the nuclear weapons option? They might even make the argument that the intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is seized of the issue of terrorism and has brought Pakistan to heel. So, the core issue before the international community is not Pakistani cross-border terrorism but the nuclear question. In the aftermath of the 1999 Kargil War, it was that which persuaded then US President Bill Clinton to give Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif a dressing down. But is anyone calling out Field Marshal Asim Munir? And if not, why not?
The FATF record shows that notwithstanding all the Pakistan-based terror attacks that India has been subjected to since Prime Minister Modi suddenly went to Raiwind near Lahore to bless Nawaz's granddaughter on the eve of her wedding in December 2015, the FATF have not placed Pakistan on the black list but have, in fact, removed it from the 'gray list'. Far from endorsing the Indian view that Pakistan is a prime mover of cross-border terrorism, the international community regards Pakistan more as a victim of terrorism than a sponsor.
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Will the MPs' delegations be able to carry conviction where a decade of Indian diplomacy and the Prime Minister's tireless peregrinations have failed to secure what we so ardently desire—the condemnation of Pakistan as a terrorist hideout? Or to stop regarding the real threat to world peace as the unique spectacle in the history of nuclear confrontation between two nuclear weapons-armed neighbours sharing the same subcontinent?
For over a decade, neither the Ministry of External Affairs nor the PMO and the Prime Minister himself have succeeded in persuading the international community of our view of Pakistan. Therefore, it is not the number of banquets to which our parliamentary delegations are entertained, but the extent to which they change international perceptions to endorse the Indian view that Pakistan deserves condign punishment for its ill deeds, and we cannot be expected to submit to Pakistan's 'nuclear blackmail'. That will be the real measure of the MPs' success or failure: ensuring that cross-border terrorism, and not the threat of nuclear war, is the core issue. The prospects are not reassuring.
Mani Shankar Aiyar served 26 years in the Indian Foreign Service, is a four-time MP with over two decades in Parliament, and was a Cabinet Minister from 2004 to 2009. He has published nine books, the latest, A Maverick in Politics, the second part of his memoir.