The impasse between Pakistan and India continues, and at this point statements of dignitaries from either side of the border have, to use an expression as outmoded as the quarrel between the two countries itself, taken on the characteristics of a broken record. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif addressed the media one final time in London before making the final leg of his journey back home and reiterated the points he raised during his speech at the UN General Assembly. While restating his desire for peace in the region and his request to India to end the blame game, he muddled the message by once again accusing India of waging a proxy war inside Pakistan and expressing his faith in the strength of the dossiers Pakistan handed to the office of UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon to galvanize the international community in its favour. He was confident that the four point peace agenda he propagated in his speech was the only sensible way forward and raised a challenge to India that sooner or later it would have to see the wisdom of his words. The issue of Kashmir was also inevitably on top of his agenda and Pakistan’s plans to internationalise the issue got something of a minor boost. Sartaj Aziz, the PM’s Foreign Affairs and National Security Adviser, has managed to get a joint resolution out of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in favour of Pakistan’s stance on Kashmir when the foreign ministers of Islamic countries met in New York and agreed to support the Kashmiri people’s right to self-determination in accordance with the UN resolutions of the past. However, it is difficult to imagine these statements turning out to be an impetus for meaningful change. While Pakistan sends out semi-contradictory signals by oscillating between mollification and aggression, India remains firmly consistent in its singular refusal to engage with Pakistan. The cause for this destructive stubbornness is either a firm ultranationalist conviction that Pakistan is playing a duplicitous game or it may simply be a pragmatic election tactic to retain favour with the BJP’s key constituency of hardliners. In either case, the Modi government is content to treat diplomacy with Pakistan like a plague and wilfully aggravates an already tense situation at the borders. If the Modi government is indeed firmly convinced of the merits of this position then it is a bad omen for any hopes of regional stability. But if it is, as some analysts suggest, simply a gambit to prevent Congress from being victorious in a regional election in Bihar, then the recklessness of the Modi government is just as worrying. Delhi is in urgent need of re-evaluating its high risk policies and focus on the necessity to eliminate a path that could lead to war. *