Nawaz Sharif says Jaishankar visit to Islamabad can help put the past behind and tackle future problems like energy and climate change ....together

Former Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif hoped that with Dr S Jaishankar's visit to Islamabad, both India and Pakistan could put the past behind and tackle future problems like energy and climate change, among others.  

Sharif hoped that Prime Minister Narendra Modi could come for the SCO meet, saying, "Would have loved for Modi to come."

"Can't change our neighbours. We should live like good neighbours," he said. 

During his visit, Jaishankar, apart from attending the formal SCO meeting where he delivered India's statement, met with his Pakistani counterpart Ishaq Dar, a close aide of Nawaz Sharif.

While delivering the speech, Jaishankar took a veiled dig at Pakistan, saying that activities across borders marred by the "three evils" of terrorism, extremism, and separatism will not encourage trade, connectivity and energy flows. 

“I have always been a supporter of good relations with India,” Nawaz Sharif has stated. 

“I hope that there is an opportunity to revive our relationship.” The PML-N supremo did not agree to appear on camera but spoke to Dutt on record.

“It would have been a great thing if PM Modi had also attended the SCO summit here in Pakistan. I do hope that he (Modi) and us will have an opportunity to sit together in the not-so-distant future.”

In 2023, Nawaz expressed his intention to normalise Pakistan’s ties with its neighbouring countries, particularly India.

“We will have to improve our relations with India, Afghanistan, and Iran. We need to ensure stronger relations with China,” he had said and recalled that during his government’s tenures, two Indian prime ministers — Atal Bihari Vajpa­yee in 1999 and Narendra Modi in 2015 — had visited Pakistan.

“Modi Sahib and Vajpayee Sahib came here (on my invitation). Did anyone come here before them?” he asked.  

In a recent article former diplomat and ex-Pakistani envoy to India, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi wrote: 

Pakistan, as the smaller of the two countries, has a relatively greater interest in restoring at least a minimum of exchanges and cooperation, and the restoration of informal or indirect discussion on how to address the more serious differences in a mutually acceptable manner.

India, on the contrary, has evinced a more or less complete lack of interest in any substantive interaction with Pakistan. It sees Pakistan as a failing terrorist state with few, if any, options from which it merely needs to protect itself. Accordingly, it sees no point in entering into discussions with such a state.

How can discussions between the two countries be more fruitful?

Even in Track 2 meetings, these attitudes prevent any serious discussions which could feed back into official policies of the two countries towards each other. Discussions, even when friendly and polite, tend to degenerate into accusations and counteraccusations reflecting official, indeed national, attitudes towards each other. They tend to become zero-sum point-scoring, which eventually becomes uninteresting and a waste of time.

The question arises: how can a broader spectrum of people from both countries, including officials, intellectuals, journalists, business people, all kinds of professionals and specialists, cultural representatives, students, tourists, etc, have greater interaction with each other which could, over time, feed positively into political attitudes towards each other?

In the absence of such a process, discussions on any issue, whether Kashmir, terrorism, water issues, treatment of minorities, increasing trade and investment, confidence building measures or other items on the agendas of past dialogues, become infructuous.

So, how can discussions between the two countries be more fruitful?" 

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