NEW DELHI – India’s former minister Mani Shankar Aiyar who is member of Rajya Sabha – the upper house of the Indian parliament – points out utter immaturity of foreign policy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying foreign policy is not about clocking up frequent flyer miles. “It is about having goals; a strategy to attain these goals; and tactical flexibility to meet unforeseen contingencies as and when these arise so that overarching goals are not lost sight of in temporary maneuvering,” he wrote in his latest column. The first principle of all diplomacy was preparation, so that summit meetings do not flounder on account of the ground not having been adequately prepared, he said. “On every one of these counts, Ufa and everything that followed, has been a diplomatic disaster without precedent,” Aiyar said. Was the intention of the Ufa meeting to resume the Pakistan-India dialogue or to sabotage it, he questioned. “Why did Modi and Nawaz Sharif succumb to the combined pressure of Russians and Chinese to either talk or remain on margins of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation,” he asked. – Elementary courtesy – “What is clear is that by buckling at the knees when the Russians and the Chinese warned the Indians and the Pakistanis at Ufa that they must either shape up or ship out, both sides went into the summit without either being properly prepared,” he said, adding that not even the elementary courtesy of Modi going forward to meet Nawaz Sharif had been chalked out. “They awkwardly talked of this and that but not of what had necessarily to be foremost on their respective minds – Kashmir, as far as Nawaz Sharif was concerned, and the Hurriyat Conference as far as Modi was concerned since it was the Indian prime minister who had made the Hurriyat the stumbling block last August by breaking off the scheduled foreign secretaries’ talks because the Pakistanis routinely arranged to meet the Kashmiris as they have been doing for a decade and a half – without doing any good to themselves or any harm to India. By rendering the Pakistan-India dialogue hostage to the Hurriyat, Modi has raised the Hurriyat to the status of arbiter of the subcontinent’s destiny, Aiyar wrote. It was none other than Lal Krishna Advani, as home minister and deputy prime minister, who first gave the Hurriyat its over-estimated standing in Jammu Kashmir, he said. “It was he (Advani) who opened a dialogue with them (Hurriyat),” he said. “How does that make them (Hurriyat) a third party to the Pakistan-India dialogue as Modi’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Sawaraj has been claiming,” asked Aiyar – a senior leader of the Congress party. “In any case, if Modi remains mired in the belief that the Hurriyat issue is more important than putting Pakistan-India relations back on track, why did he not ascertain categorically from Nawaz Sharif at Ufa whether he had abandoned the Hurriyat track,” he questioned. “Why seek dialogue at any level before first sorting out the tangled issue of Pakistan’s interaction with the Hurriyat,” he asked. For Modi, he said that the Hurriyat was more a red herring than a red line. “He (Modi) does not want to engage with Pakistan because his RSS background and his RSS masters ‘detest’ Pakistan,” the lawmaker said. In 1997, there was the fundamental breakthrough at Murree that there would be a composite dialogue in which all issues would be tackled across the board, including Jammu Kashmir. “Modi has apparently forgotten that it was we who had wanted to talk about everything and now it is we who want to talk of nothing but terrorism,” he said. “We claim the Ufa statement said the NSAs’ talks would be about all issues related to terrorism, and stress the last word. For their part, the Pakistanis stress the first two words – all issues. What terrible drafting that the two sides can literally pick two ends of the same sentence to argue past each other! That is what happens when there is not adequate preparation,” Aiyar said.