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political values in the region. Creating opportunities to articulate cultural commonalities through cultural flows is important. Here, India needs greater commitment to encourage and enable movement of people. But in South Asia talk of cultural commonality is often perceived as reflecting an assimilationist agenda. It may therefore be more appropriate to highlight the collective commitment of all states in the region to values such as the pacification of violence, human rights, minority rights, democracy and free trade. Again, while strides have been made in these areas over the last few years, the ideological task of creating genuine intra-regional societal consensus on these values remains.
    These challenges notwithstanding, India has to recognize the range of strategic opportunities it has available to it in the region. To grasp these opportunities, India will need to persuade its neighbours that its growth can be the dynamo driving forward the entire region. Second, India should also make clear that its own engagement with Asia more broadly will help to put South Asia in alarger context: that India is the region’s best portal and platform to globalization. It can signal that the world is opening up to India’s potential, and South Asia stays away from it at its own peril.
Pakistan
    The core strategic challenge in dealing with Pakistan is simultaneously to work towards achieving a degree of normality in our relationship and to cope with present and potential threats posed by Pakistan. Thus far, the difficulty of achieving a balance between these requirements has meant that India’s approach to Pakistan has periodically swung between the extremes of comprehensive engagement and almost total disengagement. India’s effort to link diplomatic engagement with Pakistan to the latter’s actions against terrorism has yielded diminishing returns. Breaking out of this pattern of engagement will require a range of mid-level options involving the use of positive and negative levers.
    The Pakistani establishment—including the army, the ISI and the bureaucratic and political elites—believes that it is only cross-border terrorism that compels India to engage with Pakistan and accommodate its interests. On the other hand, the presence of nuclear weapons on bothsides has convinced Pakistan that India will prove reluctant to initiate retaliatory responses to terrorist attacks, fearing escalation—and that this constrains any countervailing Indian strategy.
    There may be differences of emphasis, but there is no fundamental gap in the perception and attitudes among different sections of the Pakistani elite. Any significant improvement in India–Pakistan relations will therefore be slow and incremental. A grand reconciliation, if at all achievable, is likely to be the cumulative culmination of incremental steps, involving shifts in establishment attitudes there—not a one-swoop decisive historic breakthrough.
    While American, and more generally international, support is welcome in keeping pressure on Pakistan, we cannot depend on it to dissuade Pakistan from pursuing what it regards as a time-tested and successful foreign policy tool. As long as Pakistan is seen as delivering, even if half-heartedly, on US concerns over Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, only lip service will be paid to Pakistan’s obligations to deliver on its promises to prevent cross-border terrorism against India. We should, of course, use the US handle as much as we can to keep up strong pressure on Pakistan. But we should recognize that this is of limited value in persuading Pakistan to abandonits use of cross-border terrorism as an instrument of state policy.
    Pakistan’s ‘all-weather friendship’ with China shields it against adverse international fallout from the pursuit of its anti-India policies. A China which is raising its regional and global profile will provide a more effective shield to Pakistan. To be sure, China does have its own