Normal India-Pakistan disputes tend to be about firing on the Line of Control and cross-border terrorism. Home Minister Rajnath Singh's visit to Islamabad last week for a multi-lateral summit ended up with slightly more petty concerns: where the Indian media was allowed to stand, people ditching lunch plans and how many times the minister went to the washroom.
Singh was visiting Pakistan to attend the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation Home Ministers Meeting, something of a precursor to a SAARC summit in November when Prime Minister Narendra Modi is also expected to go west. The home minister's visit was always going to be fraught with tension, coming so soon after the Kashmir unrest which India has blamed squarely on Pakistan.
Before the summit, India scaled down expectations and insisted Singh was only visiting as part of India's SAARC responsibilities. Despite this, drama was inevitable.
No blackout
First there was news in the Indian media about Rajnath Singh's speech at the SAARC summit, where he called on nations not to treat terrorists as martyrs, suggesting Pakistan had blacked it out. TimesNow's Arnab Goswami said, "every second of [Rajnath Singh's] speech, was blacked out. Not one word was reported." Zee News called it "shocking!"
This actually ended up being more embarrassing for the Indian side after it emerged that Pakistan had simply followed SAARC protocol. As Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Vikas Swarup put it, "Agar event hi media ke liye open nahi hai toh aap usko black-out kaise kah sakte hain. (If the event was not even open for the media, where is the question fo calling it a black out?)"
That said, India still sought to make a point about Pakistan's approach to media coverage, with Swarup saying "the media that accompanied Hon’ble Home Minister was not in the room and a number of [journalists] who had applied for visas did not get visa. Naturally, this restrictive approach by Pakistan, even for a multilateral event, is not helpful."
Further reports have since made it clearer how messy this actually was. A PTI story with no attribution on Sunday claimed that Indian journalists were not even allowed to stand outside the gate where the SAARC conference was happening.
"[A] Pakistani official even directed some of his juniors to block the view of Indian journalists and soon the reporters and camerapersons were surrounded by several persons, apparently policemen in civvies, making it impossible for them to shoot anything."
Lunch plans
Then there was the question of lunch. Food often comes up when Indian and Pakistani officials visit each other's countries because it is an easy way to suggest some common ground. Instead, on this trip, Singh ended up not attending the customary lunch usually held by the host country after the meeting and returned to India instead.
Speaking in Parliament, the home minister explained why he did that.
"I do want to say that the Pakistan home minister invited me for lunch but then he went away in a car. I also did what was necessary to maintain the prestige of India. I don’t have any grudge. I didn’t go there for lunch."
Evidently, Chaudhury Nisar Ali Khan, Pakistan's interior minister, left the venue soon after the conference, with other Pakistani officials delegated to host the dinner. Without the minister there, Singh saw no reason to stay on.
In the loo-p
But Pakistani ministers ditching lunch plans wasn't even the oddest story of the bunch. That is best encapsulated in this headline from Daily Pakistan: The weird reason why Rajnath Singh visited the washroom 8 times during the SAARC meet.
The story says that an (unindetified) Islamabad-based news agency claimed that India's home minister went to the bathroom more than half a dozen times during the SAARC interior ministers meeting. It quote unnamed sources claiming that Singh was using the opportunity to contact officials in New Delhi via his phone.
Sunday's PTI story, which attempts to clarify what happened with the Indian journalists, also pushed back against this claim. It says that the "Pakistan establishment" was circulating the story about Singh.
"The fact is that the washroom was outside the conference hall and the Home Minister used it twice — once before the formal ministers' meet started after he and his SAARC counterparts had made a courtesy call to Pakistan Prime Sharif and again when the meeting got over."
The story added that Singh does not carry a cell phone even when he is India.
That little tid-bit just about encapsulates how messy Rajnath Singh's visit to Pakistan was. The mess is small scale – there was no bellicose talk about Kashmir and separatists and what not. Instead, it turned out so awkwardly that the Indian establishment was left clarifying how many times its minister visited the washroom. Seems like an appropriate metaphor for the state of Indo-Pakistan ties right now.
