When talks are “free and frank”

…they stopped short of coming to blows

This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.

So much have we become accustomed to Dr Manmohan Singh delivering lollipops to his Pakistani ‘counterpart’ at sidelines of multilateral meetings that this time, in Thimphu, when all he agreed was that “the show must go on”, a surreptitious sigh of relief is excusable.

After the meeting, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao said that the “Prime Ministers held very good talks in a free and frank manner”. Actually that’s good to hear. “Free” probably means that there was disagreement on the agenda. “Frank” means that the events in the meeting ranged from debate, to disagreement, to a form of behaviour that stops short of actual violence against the counterpart (matter in inanimate objects, however, might get radically rearranged).

This meeting was unnecessary. As Polaris wrote, the Indian delegation should have told the meticulously Pakistanis who turned up in Bhutan to “take us to your leaders”.

If you would like to share or comment on this, please discuss it on my GitHub Previous
Robert Wrong Next
On Yahoo! India columns, every fortnight