Pakistan PM intends to work with India for peace

Bloomberg

Pakistan’s new Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi has set himself a possibly insurmountable challenge. He intends to work with arch-rival India to achieve peace across South Asia.
It’s likely to be a tall order for Abbasi considering the two nuclear-armed nations haven’t had high-level dialogue for almost two years and given the institutional opposition of Pakistan’s military against reconciliation with India, which has fought three wars with its larger neighbor since independence from British colonial rule in 1947.
Tensions have remained high since January last year when Pakistan-based insurgents attacked an Indian air base near the border, derailing scheduled talks between the two countries. A second raid by militants on an army camp in Kashmir last year prompted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to order an offensive on the Pakistan-controlled part of the disputed region and destroy camps it said were hosting terrorists. Pakistan denied India’s cross-border raid took place, though firing across the so-called “Line of Control” is frequent.
“We intend to work with them to achieve stability in the region,” Abbasi, who took top office three weeks ago when his predecessor Nawaz Sharif was ousted in July after a corruption investigation, said in an interview in Karachi late Saturday. “We will try to work with India, but they have not reciprocated as they should have.”
Abbasi denied that militants are allowed to operate in the country and Pakistan says it only provides moral support to people in Muslim-majority Kashmir, which is claimed in totality by both nations.
“We have never had an appeasement policy towards India,” Abbasi said during the interview in the former home of Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah. “Pakistan is going to deal with India on a bilateral basis and on equal footing.”
Previous detentes haven’t lasted. Modi invited former premier Sharif to his inauguration in May 2014 and visited him on his birthday the following year, only for the 2016 attacks to kill any rapprochement.
With Pakistanis heading to the ballot box next year, Abbasi’s comments aren’t “really likely to be taken seriously in Delhi, because Modi isn’t going to expend political capital with Pakistan when we don’t know who will
be in power after the election,” said Pratyush Rao, a senior
Singapore-based analyst at
consultancy Control Risks.
Imran Khan, the leader of Pakistan’s second-largest opposition party, also said in an interview this month that better ties with India are unlikely while Hindu-nationalist Modi is in office, even though increased trading
between the two nations could reduce poverty.