NORMALISATION of ties with India, spearheaded by the normalisation of trade, was supposed to be the centrepiece of the PML-N government’s foreign policy. It was a point underlined, reiterated and spelled out time and again by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif before and after the election. If there was anything the government was going to do, the consensus was, it would be forward movement on India by sweeping away the old excuses and constraints. Unhappily, the relationship with India has become yet another area in which the government inexplicably appears to have allowed policy drift and paralysis to settle in. Why has a trade deal with India, so tantalisingly close just last month, stalled? The government is offering a raft of excuses about why it has backtracked on its own initiative, but few of them are credible or particularly believable. The idea that the government’s negotiating team was unaware what the formal start of the Indian general election campaign meant for both the timing and possibility of a trade deal is, quite simply, laughable. In fact, the deadline was the very reason Commerce Minister Khurram Dastagir travelled to India earlier this year.

So, what happened? Perhaps the government here realised that a visit by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was not going to materialise and so, miffed by the diplomatic rebuff, decided to wait until after the election. If that is in fact the real reason, it would suggest a naivety and ingenuousness in policymaking that would be shocking for a third-term prime minister. Surely, the answer must lie somewhere else — and, in the Pakistani context, it is never very difficult to guess where that somewhere else lies. Did the army leadership indicate an inability to endorse the government’s big initiative with India, thereby scuttling a trade deal, for now or perhaps even the foreseeable future? Despite denials by both sides about the army leadership exercising its veto, there is a plausible scenario where Prime Minister Sharif decided that his other main initiative — dialogue with the TTP — needed army facilitation and so decided not to press too hard on the India front as a tacit quid pro quo. If so, it would be a sad capitulation by a political government at a time that the transition to democracy is supposed to be moving forward stronger than ever.

Yet, it was the vast, coordinated and unprecedented show of force by the LeT/JuD in Punjab on March 23 that was more shocking still. Even if the PML-N does not have the will to push through its own agenda on trade with India in the face of the army opposition, how and why does it allow the group to so brazenly promote its anti-India agenda on Pakistan Day? The already evident policy paralysis of the PML-N is drifting alarmingly towards total disarray.