There is no hashtag on Twitter called #RajapakseAtSAARC. Or #SharifAtSAARC. But there is one called #ModiAtSAARC. That pretty much sums up what Indian media think the 18th SAARC summit is all about – a scenic Himalayan backdrop for Narendra Modi to do another of his veni vidi vici international trips.
The SAARC summit was open on the anniversary of the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai. The alleged mastermind of those attacks is still roaming free in Pakistan. Modi had been tweeting about combating the menace of terror and uprooting it from the face of humankind today. With the him and Nawaz Sharif sharing the same platform, the stage was set for some high-octane drama.
In SAARC, Sharif talked about disease, unemployment, malnourishment, poverty, illiteracy. Everything but terror. Where Modi brought up the “horror of the terror attack” of 26/11 but so briefly if you blinked you would have missed it. He did not link Pakistan to the attack, chose not to shame it in Kathmandu, and made no demands of it at all, opting instead to just say we needed to combat terrorism and transnational crimes because a prosperous SAARC depends on security. More bromide than brimstone.(Source : firstpost.com )
It is not only Prime Minister Narendra Modi who decided to corner Pakistan at the SAARC summit in Nepal after continuous and unprovoked truce violations and a stalemate over Kashmir with the nation but his Pak counterpart Nawaz Sharif seems to have come to the nation with the same mind-set. Narendra Modi takes SAARC more seriously than the myopic Indian media. Modi deserves full credit for giving a “South Asian” speech and trying to acknowledge the problems besetting the region. And unlike what the channels would tell us it’s not just “terror factories” in Pakistan. He brought up the problems of visas between the countries, how goods had to do quite a parikrama before coming from one to the other, how our internal trade was low, how Indian companies invested billions abroad but less than 1% in the region. Sharif talked about disease, unemployment, malnourishment, poverty, illiteracy. Everything but terror. Modi did bring up the “horror of the terror attack” of 26/11 but so briefly if you blinked you would have missed it. He did not link Pakistan to the attack, chose not to shame it in Kathmandu, and made no demands of it at all, opting instead to just say we needed to combat terrorism and transnational crimes because a prosperous SAARC depends on security. More bromide than brimstone.
