Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr | Is Pak off Sangh radar? Ties uneasy amid focus on China

External affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has of late been duelling with the European Union over its insistence that India should condemn Russia over the war in Ukraine and not have any trade links with Moscow, and at other times he has been reiterating that India-China relations cannot be normal unless China switches off its aggressive stance at the undefined Line of Actual Control. The recent clash between India and Pakistan at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation foreign ministers’ meeting in Goa was an indirect one, and visiting Pakistan foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari got the proverbial cold shoulder. But with the country’s economy growing in size, and the world, especially the rich democracies of the G-7 looking to India as a foil to powerful China in Asia, the BJP politicians in the government and in the party and the pro-government chattering classes are not talking about Pakistan any more. The foreign office and the armed forces must be keeping a constant watch over the current happenings in Pakistan, but the pro-Modi intelligentsia is speaking more about how the world is looking to India rather than the existential threat that Pakistan poses to “Hindu” India. Many would say that this is a positive development, and that the fading away of Hindu Right’s angst and anxiety over “Muslim” Pakistan should make for a more peaceful South Asia.