India Needs to Rethink Its Conventional Geopolitical Binaries: Sherry Rehman

Islamabad:The Institute of Regional Studies (IRS) and the Beaconhouse Center of Policy Research (BCPR) hosted a roundtable discussion on the current state of Pakistan-India relations. Senator Sherry Rehman, the keynote speaker, delivered an insightful address, highlighting the prolonged stagnation and strategic distrust between the two nations, while making a case for moving to emerging sustainability engagement frameworks other than conventional geopolitics or even geoeconomics. “The envelope of thought leadership has to expand,” she said.

Sherry Rehman remarked, “It has been a long time since we did a stock-take of Pakistan-India relations. The fact is that, given the 2019 unilateralism of Modi’s majoritarian regime, specifically in Kashmir, discussions become circular, and we are stalemated in a long, internecine arc of strategic distrust between the two countries.”

Talking about the seemingly impregnable firewall of distrust now between the two states, Rehman said, “Distrust is the huge elephant in the room in all conversations, whether they are formal or Track 1, Track 2, or Track 1.5 dialogues. Part of the reason is that conventional geopolitics has failed the world, and we see all around us a fraying and disruption of the rules-based order that once guided peace and war to a modicum in this world. India and Israel are two predatory states that rule by colonization and unilateral annexations, yet their genocidal wars have a troubling impunity. I call that a failure of the rules that underwrite the global order.”

Discussing the challenges in engaging with a regional predator, Rehman said, “Since 2019, there aren’t any ties, and all attempts to engage by Pakistan have been miscast as ‘petitioning’ for peace. But that is not the case at all. Pakistan always seeks recourse to the rational, without aggressive posturing or projection of an outdated 20th-century dynamic in a rapidly changing world. The drift towards majoritarianism and Hindu Nationalism has taken over India.”

Rehman criticized the myopia of the current Indian administration, “Modi has created a republic of fear in Kashmir, but Modi 3.0 lost because of 44% youth unemployment, among other things, and this obsession with Pakistan will not help win more votes. Nor is that a way forward.”

Unpacking Pakistan’s position, she concluded, “Islamabad has regularly shown its openness to dialogue with India. Pakistan has not petitioned for peace at a price with India. Even a discussion on Kashmir or bilateral ties with India is not petitioning for an unjust or asymmetrical arrangement. We have made big gestures for peace, such as Former Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari going to the SCO physically, but that opportunity was not used by India; quite the opposite. The current Foreign Minister, Ishaq Dar, signaled Pakistan’s openness to dialogue with India. Signaling does not suggest recourse to an unjust or asymmetrical search for peace or normalization of ties.”

Rehman pointed out the unpredictability of the future and the inadequacy of old defensive realism models, “The future is not at all predictable, nor do old defensive realism models work to interpret new risks arising in South Asia from demographic deprivations, scarcity migrations, food insecurity, and climate stress. India is as or more exposed to these as Pakistan. So using only old-school geopolitical framing to understand emerging metatrends won’t help.”

She emphasized the need for imaginative thinking and addressing India’s defense and nuclear focus, “Let us look at whether India’s public narrative of pivoting as a smart power to the Asia Pacific actually matches its actions.