This respite with Pakistan, tenuous and temporary as it well might be, only underscores the extraordinary domestic and external benefits that could accrue to India if we are able to bury the bitter legacy of Partition once and for all.

Imagine for a moment an early settlement of the Jammu and Kashmir question, a reasonably open border and freer trade between India and Pakistan. Imagine, too, what a lasting peace in the subcontinent would do to the international standing of India and Pakistan. Consider how Indo-Pak reconciliation might recast the question of religion that has hobbled the subcontinent for so long.

This imagination need not be a fantasy. It is quite well-known that the back channel negotiations between India and Pakistan on J&K have already made immense progress. Holding up the big moves on J&K are not insurmountable difficulties in the sensitive negotiation, but the fact that Pakistan has been preoccupied with its internal political turmoil since March. If President Pervez Musharraf does reconsolidate his position in the next few months, the Indo-Pak peace process will be ready for prime time all over again.

Getting to this unprecedented peace interlude with Pakistan has not been easy. From the late 1980s to the early years of this decade has been the worst period since Partition marked by repeated military confrontations on the border, the nuclearisation of the subcontinent, a limited war in Kargil and the brutalising impact of terrorism and religious extremism. A lot of credit goes to former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee for laying the foundation for this peace process amidst all the viciousness at the turn of the decade. Even more credit goes to Manmohan Singh for building on this foundation despite the fears within his own party and enduring self-doubt within the national security establishment. Since 2004, when the peace process was relaunched, more positive developments have occurred between the two nations than in the many previous decades. If the PM does succeed in taking the Indo-Pak peace process to the next stage, his triumph will far exceed the government’s nuclear accomplishment with the US. The nuclear deal, big as it might be, does little to ease India’s principal national security vulnerability since the Partition and Independence — the unsettled Kashmir dispute with Pakistan and the persistent Hindu-Muslim divide within the nation.

... contd.