It took two many insults within as many days from the Pakistani foreign minister SM Qureshi for the Indian media to finally conclude on Friday afternoon that India-Pakistan talks had collapsed. But it will take the Indian establishment a lot more time and ingenuity to explain just why in a government characterised by motormouth ministers external affairs minister SM Krishna chose to suffer the crassness of his host in silence.

Make no mistake: this was not just a case of a Pakistani foreign minister shedding his diplomatic veneer; this was a Pakistani foreign minister slamming the Indian home secretary in a joint press conference and claiming that his Indian counterpart sitting next to him shared his view on this count. What’s more, here was a Pakistani foreign minister equating the Indian home secretary with the man India believes to be the mastermind of the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai. And he didn’t stop at just that. The next day, while addressing the Pakistani media, Qureshi took another swipe at his Indian counterpart saying Krishna received calls from New Delhi during their meeting while he did not leave even once to take a phone call. 

Krishna’s conduct is as curious as his government’s engagement with the enemy across the border is indefensible. If his earlier deputy, minister of state for external affairs Shashi Tharoor, demonstrated the perils of public communication in overdrive, Krishna just proved that silence is not always golden. And when he did speak up later, Krishna actually claimed that he was working to an agenda and that he was satisfied with the talks to an extent.

Would it have helped if there had been a P Chidambaram or a Kapil Sibal or a Kamal Nath or a Jairam Ramesh instead of Krishna? Arguably, yes, if only for the larger reason that the talks were destined to fail anyway and it does the national psyche little good to have insult heaped upon injury which has repeatedly been allowed to be inflicted by successive governments in New Delhi. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his team have, however, insisted on ignoring the national mood and pursuing the policy of talking for the sake of talking, at the instance of US of A, despite Pakistan’s consistent anti-India policies. Talks will be delinked from terror, the Congress-led government decided when it became abundantly clear that Pakistan would do little to bring the perpetrators of the 26/11 massacre to justice.

Now that Qureshi has blown to smithereens the facade of periodic cordial talks, will our government tell us that we need to delink national pride from the need to talk to Pakistan?