I wrote last week about the frustrating futility of the India-Pakistan peace process. I argued that no lasting peace between the two countries was possible as long as Kashmir remained the bone of contention. But, I said, I saw no solution to the Kashmir dispute. India regards Kashmir as an integral part of our country and this position is non-negotiable. Pakistan regards Kashmir as a Muslim state under military occupation by Indian forces. Both positions are so far apart that no compromise solution appears likely.

   As if on cue, the peace talks between Pakistan and India collapsed in acrimony on Thursday with the Pakistani foreign minister complaining that no settlement on Kashmir or other core issues was forthcoming. The Indians, he said, were not even willing to agree to a time-bound peace process. (You have to admire the fellow’s optimism: he thinks he can settle Kashmir in three months even though better men than he have failed to reach any agreement for several decades.) In the event, declared the Pakistanis, all talks seemed to be going nowhere because of Indian intransigence.

   It wasn’t meant to end this way. Diplomats never let their foreign ministers talk to each other unless officials have sat down and agreed among themselves about the outcome of each summit meeting. This time around, officials on both sides had agreed to announce a series of low-key confidence building measures as a means of demonstrating that the peace process was not dead. Nobody expected much more from the summit and certainly, nobody expected this level of acrimony.

   What went wrong? The Indian side believes that the Pakistan Army is to blame. The Army is under enormous pressure from the Americans over Afghanistan where it has a long-standing presence. It would rather focus on Afghanistan – and wrap up the small Indian presence still remaining – than worry about some endless peace process with India. According to some Indian observers, the civilian government was willing to talk but the Army had no interest in the negotiations.

   The Pakistanis offer a different perspective. There are the explanations that verge on abuse. Their foreign minister ended the summit by belittling S M Krishna, by suggesting that he lacked any mandate from New Delhi and by sneering that he kept leaving the room to receive instructions on his mobile phone.

   These charges are preposterous. But even if they are true, they do not fit the facts as we know them. Krishna arrived in Pakistan with a specific mandate: to keep the peace process going and to announce low-key confidence building measures. The Pakistanis had agreed to this summit agenda.

   All the Pakistani foreign minister had to do was to stick to this agenda. None of the issues that were being discussed were of such an unexpected nature that Krishna had to rush from the room and phone Manmohan Singh for further instructions.

   It was the Pakistanis who deviated from the summit’s agenda by throwing in the demand for a time-bound peace process and asking India to sort out the problems of decades within a few months. They must have known that the time-bound idea was a non-starter. The fact that they raised it anyway suggests that they were quite happy to let the summit fail.

   Why should that be so? Why should they suddenly change their minds about the summit’s agenda, so painstakingly worked out by their own officials?

   One Pakistani explanation is that home secretary G K Pillai spoilt everything. On the eve of the summit, Pillai addressed the staff of a Delhi newspaper. Asked a specific question about what India had learnt from David Headley, Pillai responded that Headley’s interrogation had left Indian investigators in no doubt that Pakistan’s ISI was behind the 26/11 Bombay attacks.

   Pillai’s remarks so angered the Pakistanis that their foreign minister even compared the Indian home secretary to Hafiz Syed, suggesting that things have now got so bad in Pakistan that its ministers can no longer tell the difference between civil servants and the jehadi terrorists who enjoy the patronage of Paksitan’s secret state.

   Apparently, the Pakistanis were so agitated that they decided to turn the summit into an acrimonious fiasco and to demand time-bound settlement of Kashmir, Siachen etc.

   Strangely, many Indians appear to agree with this assessment. Some have even suggested that Pillai’s remarks symbolize the gulf between the home ministry which wants action against Pakistan-based terrorists and the PMO which wants world happiness and global peace.

   I find this position bizarre. If the Indian home secretary had gratuitously issued an anti-Pakistani statement on the eve of the summit, I could understand people regarding this as inappropriate. But Pillai did nothing of the sort. He addressed journalists during an interaction that had been fixed in advance, was asked a specific question and gave an honest answer.

   What was he supposed to have done? He is a civil servant not a politician. His job is to tell the truth and to help protect Indians from terrorist attacks. His job is not to distort reality to please the Pakistan foreign minister.

   But the way in which some Indians are blaming Pillai for the summit’s failure tells us something about the woolly-headed approach that we bring to India-Pakistan talks.

   Why are we talking to Islamabad? Few of us believe that these talks will lead to the resolution of the Kashmir dispute. But we support the peace process because we take Pakistan at its word when it says that it is committed to fighting terrorism. We believe that the two countries can cooperate in the battle against jehadis – a few years ago we even set up a joint anti-terror mechanism.

   Not only has this so-called cooperation yielded nothing (each time we send them a dossier, the Pakistanis laugh in our faces) but we have now even psyched ourselves into believing that we must hide the truth about Pakistani involvement in terrorism in India for fear of offending the poor dears. Upright Indian civil servants are expected to lie to the media only so that diplomats can announce low key and largely meaningless confidence building measures.

   I remain pessimistic about the peace process. Nevertheless I believe that dialogue should continue – we gain nothing from silence.

   But let’s not be surprised when the Pakistanis turn on us as they did last week. And let’s not expect our civil servants to lie about events like 26/11 only so that the Pakistani foreign minister’s feelings are spared.

   Any peace process that is based on lies is doomed to fail anyway.