Ever since shrill hostility gave way to an effort at dialogue between India and Pakistan, every little perturbation has been viewed as a potentially fatal blow to the tenuous engagement. The so-called 'composite dialogue' between the two governments, covering a diverse range of issues, has been little more than a desultory series of talks going nowhere, punctuated by both public euphoria and bitter mutual recriminations. However, recent events suggest that the engagement between the two sides may just have become more sustainable and substantial.
If there has been any dominant motif in the 'peace process' between India and Pakistan, it is undoubtedly its ability to generate public mood swings of epic proportions. Though the term is relatively new, the 'peace process' was properly set in motion in 1997, under the guise of a 'composite dialogue'. The dialogue did not quite measure up to the appellation of a 'peace process', since it descended on one occasion into outright war in Kargil, and, on at least two others, into the possibility of wars in which the use of nuclear weapons was discussed with studied casualness. If 'peace process' continued to be used, it was largely a consequence of both the lack of a suitable alternative-term and of the extravagance of hope bumping up against the compulsions of reality.
But the 29 October 2005 serial bombings in Delhi, which killed over 60 people and cast a pall over the pre-holiday city, engendered a wholly different dynamic. The rush to judgement, so much in evidence in India in the past, was conspicuously absent. Though the pain was deeply felt, cries for revenge and retribution were relatively muted. Much more so than the attack on the Parliament in December 2001, the bombings that hit Delhi the week before Diwali and Eid-ul-Fitr were celebrated in a rare conjunction represented a grave assault on the sensibility of every citizen of the Indian capital. Yet the public reaction could not have been more different than four years previously.
The Parliament attack was widely portrayed as a defining moment for India in its long and arduous struggle against terrorism. It ostensibly marked a transition from a holding operation by the Indian state to an aggressive doctrine of prevention and even pre-emption of terrorism. It resulted in an effort at coordination, in principle and practice, between India and other self-proclaimed leaders of the struggle against terrorism, notably the United States and Israel. Domestically, the attack was used to test the efficacy of newly-crafted anti-terrorism legislation in charging the perpetrators.