Impediments to bilateralism

Two developments in the realm of Pakistan-India relations grab the attention of people of the sub-continent in particular and the world at large in general: the attack in Indian Punjab's Gurdaspur district that left 10 people dead, and video clips retrieved from the Indian spy drone that Pakistan army downed earlier this month near the Line of Control. In Gurdaspur, according to media reports, Indian police overcame a group of gunmen dressed in military fatigues after a 12-hour battle that ended in a small town police station near the border with Pakistan. In the first such attack in Indian Punjab in more than a decade, unidentified gunmen shot dead a barber and tried to hijack a bus before rushing to the police station.
How ironic and unfortunate it is that while the regional police chief told reporters at the scene that it was "too early to say" where the gunmen had come from, a junior minister in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's office sought to poison Indian people's minds by saying that he did not rule out Pakistan's involvement in the attack, losing sight of the fact that the attack could herald the reappearance of Sikh separatists who launched a campaign for independence from New Delhi following their pogrom carried out by Hindu fanatics as a violent reaction to the killing of the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, by her Sikh bodyguards. India must recognise the fact with an open mind that not only has Pakistan condemned the attack in strongest terms and extended condolences to the people of India and their government, the principal Kashmiri militant leader Syed Salahuddin too has denied that his men were involved.
Insofar as video clips retrieved from the quadcopter are concerned, it has been proven beyond any iota of doubt that it was nothing but an aborted Indian spy mission across the Line of Control. It was an aborted mission in the sense that the Pakistan army downed it successfully. The video clips are great substantive evidence to prove the growing Indian belligerence against its neighbour.
It is, however, heartening to note that Modi and his top Cabinet colleagues have not accused Pakistan of its involvement in the Gurdaspur attack; they left the job of feeding the Hindutva narrative to a junior minister. Their stance is perhaps characterised by a broad understanding that they reached in the Russian city of Ufa on the sidelines of the SCO summit where they sought to revive stalled relations between New Delhi and Islamabad. Both the governments are therefore required to protect and preserve that understanding by initiating actions that contribute to efforts aimed at creating peace in the region. None of the two must resort to tactics such as the launch of a spy mission through a quadcopter.