Indo-Pak interior secretaries' meeting

The first time Indian Home Secretary GK Pillai appeared on the public radar in Pakistan was his 'pre-emptive' comment on the eve of a meeting of the foreign ministers of Pakistan and India. His comment was too vicious and our then Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi simply found it indigestible. His reaction was essentially undiplomatic in that he found his host Krishna's repeated phone calls to his government unacceptable, without realising that the Indian foreign minister's briefing on some issues that cropped up during the meeting was inadequate.
After all, it is the government which formulates its foreign policy and not the foreign minister. But that's not the situation now, not that Pillai's worldview has morphed or the peace-in-the-air is too compelling to remain untouched of its freshness. Something happened between then and now and that is the reality of the Samjhota Express blasts. Not that the Indian home minister knew who were the culprits but it was now the public that had come to know that terrorism has also an Indian brand.
With reality of terrorism phenomenon now having fully dawned on both sides of the border, agreeing to effectively tackle the menace in co-operative framework, shorn of hawks-driven cavil, has become a lot more uncomplicated. No wonder then Pakistan's Interior Secretary Qamar Zaman Chaudhry's meeting with his counterpart was quite productive, especially in providing comfort to many innocent victims of vagaries of nature or vigour of inhuman laws in line with the spirit of times that come to obtain thanks to the wonders of cricket.
The decision to share "real time intelligence" to prevent terror attacks is indeed the much-awaited move required as it always was to pre-empt the terrorist networks' established capability to precipitate a situation which can derail whatever little the governments in Pakistan and India achieve consequent to their not-so-regular undertakings.
The proposed hotline linking the secretaries of the two countries was always needed and now should be promptly set up. The fact is that momentous events like the semi-finals of the World Cup now in progress should be so much at risk of going awry is the unmistakable indication of closer co-operative state-level relationship independent of abrupt developments which terrorists always retain. It's worth repeating that terrorism is essentially a sociological occurrence and use of force as the only antidote to this illness has limited potential.
Outstanding disputes between Pakistan and India, which consistently draw sustenance from the two governments' failure to come to grips with these (and these clashing positions have festered over time) are a major source of disruptive forces that tend to flourish.
Given the governments' traditional mindsets there is a need to search out-of-the-box solutions. That the meeting of the interior secretaries succeeded in alleviating the misery of many unintended victims like inadvertent land and seas crossers, visa-expiry and prisoners who are too poor to pay for the fines tagged to their sentences is one major success and should be appreciated.
That the two governments would assist each other in more effectively dealing with the high-profile terrorist attacks it's another big success. Surely time to move beyond the lip-service approaches in dealing with terrorism-specific incidents is now and if the two secretaries have come to that realisation it indeed has the potential to open a new chapter in the history of Pak-Indian relationship which in many significant ways impacts the lives of millions.