India and Pakistan: a new over in the offing?

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Even gods have their moments of doubt- of coming up against seemingly insurmountable odds. And it would seem Cricket, one of the subcontinents most venerated gods may have met such a match in the current India-Pakistan détente. Politicians in Pakistan and cricket lovers in India alike have decried the IPL auction that rejected every Pakistani player up for bids- outraged that team owners were unable to overcome visa fears and security risks to transcend borders."Cricket, after all, " wrote in one agitated viewer, "has no political boundaries." But it does. And to assume that it should be able to overlook them would be to give the sport a much greater leadership role in solving bilateral problems than it deserves, or indeed should aspire to. Why blame commercially driven team owners if the math of India-Pakistan relations adds up to a big zero right now? Fortunately for those disappointed fans,....

India and Pakistan: deadlines for dialogue

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Every impending deadline, coupled with the window of opportunity for talks in Kashmir, underscores the need for a new line of engagement between New Delhi and Islamabad. As a slew of new track-2 and track-3 initiatives try to build a 'roadmap' for a new India-Pakistan dialogue, it may be time to look at some of the circumstances in which dialogue has been derailed in the past - and hunt clues for the future. In the parlance of India-Pakistan ties, specifically in the past decade, it is the top leadership that has proposed new initiatives for peace, and it is terrorists and those who direct them who have been most easily a ble to dispose of them. On the night of the Mumbai terror attacks of November 26, 2008, just an hour before the attackers fired the first shot, the Indian and Pakistani Foreign Ministers were holding a press....