The rosy outlook was, however, quickly brought down to reality with the news about the massacres of twenty Hindus in Jammu and Kashmir. In addition, the military chiefs of Pakistan refused to join the welcome party for Vajpayee in Pakistan. These two events bring into focus the underlying problem that plagues South Asia: no matter how much diplomacy, statesmanship and international pressure is applied, the militant Islamic circles of Pakistan will never pull back their deadly proxies from Jammu and Kashmir state. These militant Islamic circles have an intense hatred for secular India, which stands as a lonely but steady bulwark against the further eastward spread of Islam. This intense hatred has been channelled for a long period of time into attempting to wrest the state of Jammu and Kashmir and complete its total Islamization. Ethnic cleansing of Hindus from the area is one of the pivotal strategies in this game plan. Most Hindus were driven out of Kashmir valley by 1990-1991. Massacres of Hindus in the southern reaches of the state are an attempt to ensure that the ethnic cleansing stretches out all across the state. The ultimate instigators of this continued ethnic cleansing, the Pakistanis, have the temerity to talk about "self-determination" for Kashmir as they continue to arm, aid, abet and support thousands of ruthless Islamic terrorists and mercenaries headed to the state. Everyone in Kashmir knows that "self-determination" in Kashmir is a code word only applicable to a homogenized Islamic population, the result of decades of engineered expulsions of ethnic Hindus in the state. 

To imagine that a summit between Vajpayee and Pakistani PM Sharif would overcome these deadly forces is at best naivete. Pakistan has not hesitated to use international terrorism and nuclear threats to stretch its Islamic conquest further east. In addition, Pakistanis are far more adept at international diplomacy than Indians have demonstrated. Vajpayee may be walking into a diplomatic trap far worse than he may be imagining. Pakistan holds too many cards. It is no small feat that Pakistan, with its massive international Islamic terrorist machinery, is courted by western democratic countries and is rescued from dire financial straits by the Clinton administration, a self-avowed nemesis of global terrorists.