NEW DELHI -- Behind the blame game over the collapse of the India-Pakistan summit in Agra, a harsh reality faces New Delhi. The expectations and calculations that prompted Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to make a dramatic U-turn in his Pakistan policy and invite Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf proved to be wrong. He overestimated several factors and underrated some others. He now needs to examine why he went wrong and recalibrate his policy.
The United States also got it wrong. It led India up the summit path without a full and realistic understanding of Musharraf's political constrictions, as opposed to his rhetorical readiness, to make a leap forward. Maybe Washington's aim was merely to get India and Pakistan back at the negotiating table. But the failure to accurately assess ground realities has made even the objective of ensuring a sustained, multifaceted dialogue more difficult.
The summit meeting foundered not on differences over intricate elements of any breakthrough in the works, but on the same old conceptual divergence on how to proceed toward mending bilateral relations. When India made its famous somersault on Pakistan policy in late May, it obviously did not anticipate that the summit would get mired in the old, trite, abstract questions or that it would get beaten at its own game.
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