 I think we should go ahead and get started. People are still kind of wandering in. It's tough to peel away from chocolate things that are in the lobby, which I can understand. Thank you all for coming to this session this afternoon. My name is Toby Dalton. I'm a co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment and one of the hosts of this conference. The session today is on the intersection of media and conflict and peace in South Asia. And I hope that we'll have a lively discussion. I wanted to make a couple of announcements up front, the first of which is that in an effort to make sure our polling technology works smoothly. At the end of this session, we will run a live poll. And so if you haven't already done so, you need to download the conference app. And as we get ready to have the live poll, I will give you some directions on how to participate in it. The topic of the panel, George. George asks what the poll is going to be about. If I gave it away now, where's the suspense? Second thing I would say, speaking of George Perkovich, he and I were fortunate enough to be able to write a book that kind of touches a little bit on this issue that was published last year. It's called Not War, Not Peace. And if you are so inclined, you may purchase a copy of the book at the back. We've got one that's already purchased. Thank you, sir. I assure you that we take no royalties from it, but it's for a good cause, no less. So I'm hoping that today and this panel will be able to touch a little bit on some of the themes that that book addresses, which is the predicament that India and Pakistan find themselves in, in which war in the presence of nuclear weapons is a really unpalatable, even unthinkable option. And yet the lack of a peace process is also a difficult and unthinkable option, too. The point of departure that I'd like to start with for this panel is an event that happened last September. And specifically it was on September 8th, sorry, September 18th of last year. There was an attack on an Indian army base in the portion of Kashmir, a base called Uri. And 19 Indian soldiers were killed in this attack and it was blamed on terrorists coming across the line of control from Pakistan. And this received a lot of media coverage in India. It was a very shocking event for many people. And over the ensuing 10 days, the Indian government deliberated about how to respond to this event and wrestled with many of the options that we describe in the book, military responses, diplomatic responses, et cetera. In fact, they pursued some diplomatic responses. They announced that they would pull out of the meeting of the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation meeting that was supposed to take place in Pakistan. The government made noises that it might pull out or review the Indus Waters Treaty as a way to pressure Pakistan. And then on September 29th, there was kind of a sensational announcement that in the wee hours of the morning Indian commandos had conducted surgical strikes on, quote, unquote, terrorist launch pads on the Pakistani side of the line of control. The details around this were rather murky and, in fact, sufficiently murky that the response from the Pakistani government was to deny that the raid happened at all. So there was a kind of an interesting set of circumstances that here you have this very publicly announced raid and then a very publicly announced no raid, which was strange. But more interesting than the details of this particular incident, although I think we'll get into it and germane to the discussion today is the media environment in both Pakistan and India in which this series of events was playing out. And more broadly, how media relates to peace and conflict in South Asia. We have an excellent panel. I'm pleased to have three friends and colleagues who are all actively engaged in these issues in each in different ways. Immediately to my left is Ms. Vita Sharma, who's a journalist from India. Until last week, she was deputy editor and foreign affairs in charge at India Today TV. To her left is Ms. Huma Yusuf. She is an award-winning Pakistani journalist, global fellow at the Wilson Center, associate director at the political risk consultancy of control risks in London and writes weekly in Don and often on these kinds of issues. And then finally at the end, but certainly not least, is Mr. Shahshank Joshi, who's a senior research fellow at Russi in London, writes prolifically on Twitter at least about Indian foreign security policy but also books as well, most recently Indian power projection, ambition, arms and influence. So to kick start the discussion, Smita, let me start with you. I presume I think you were reporting on these incidents on TV nightly in India as they were playing out in September of last year. What's your sense of the prevalent narratives that existed in the media about these events? And more to the point, what's your sense about how the media related to the decision-making in the government? Was it contributing to or helping pressure the government to make certain choices? Did it constrain certain choices or was it not really a factor in the government process itself? Thank you, Toby. Thanks to George and you and Carnegie for having me here and hello to co-panelists and all your friends out here. Well, it's just been two days of my freedom from my last news organization and I'm hoping that the freedom continues for at least a month before I take over my next assignment. But as Toby mentioned, in fact, I was with the India Today Group. Incidentally, it so happened that I was in Hawaii because I had been nominated for an advanced security course at the APCSS, which comes under the Pacific Command. But as luck would have it, just when I was about to fly to Hawaii and this news comes in that, of course, India has carried out terror strikes, which they call surgical strikes. Believe it or not, but I was on the gorgeous beaches of Hawaii where everybody else was roaming around in trunks and bikinis and I was standing with a selfie stick and a mobile in hand and talking about the escalation of conflict across the line of control, pulling a very straight face as people around me would look at me with a lot of suspicion as to what is wrong with her. You know, who talks about escalation of conflict in Hawaii? But that is the nature of the job, especially if you are handling foreign affairs in India. There is a degree of unhealthy obsession, if I may put it so, when it comes to Pakistan and China affairs. More so, foreign policy is mostly reduced to what is happening on the borders or the line of control with Pakistan. And, you know, before I go on to your question, Toby, I guess it's a little important to explain to you that the nature of the medium is very, very different when you're talking about South Asia, especially in India and Pakistan. If I could just give you some figures about the media industry that we are talking about. Mostly when you talk about media in India, a lot of people simply think about television. There are some 1600 satellite TV stations in India of which more than 50% are news stations. So you're looking at almost 800 TV stations which are not just the English-language TV stations, which are not just the Hindi-language TV stations, not just national, but regional and vernacular. In terms of the newspapers, as of 2015, there were 12,000 plus registered newspaper titles that were functioning. So these are huge numbers that you have. And these media houses are competing for a pie which is not really expanding because the entertainment sector pie has been increasing, not really the news. So you're dealing with a sphere here where there is infotainment or information combined with entertainment. The ad revenue model, all of this combined to the way why media is working in a certain way in our part of the world. And when it comes to Pakistan, what has happened is of course in 2014 with the coming in of the BJP-led government under Narendra Modi, the entire narrative has now shifted to nationalism which is garbed under the patriotism narrative. So when something like an Uri happens, there were two, three factors. A, of course, there has been that increasing sense, the public mood of facing constant terror strikes which people believe perpetrate from Pakistan. And there is no sense of justice, be it the Mumbai attacks or the other attacks. B, increasingly when you have a narrative of nationalism with a right of center government that enjoys a very, very popular mandate. So much so, the government really just won a state elections in Uttar Pradesh and it's unprecedented that world leaders called in Prime Minister Narendra Modi to congratulate him. We had never heard so that world leaders would be calling in to congratulate a Prime Minister at the victory of the state elections but that state is the most popular state in India. So in Uri, there was a lot of celebration in media on the surgical strikes. I would say there wasn't really too much of questioning because people who were questioning, there were few voices in media, especially in print media. The way print functions is much more perhaps stable than television, which is much more screaming, shouting, bellicosity and we have some stations and some journalists who could put easily below Riley to shame, you know, it's like there's no competition, don't even talk about it. You have entire screens on fire and people, it's nothing but a circus. So you know, some of the headlines, one of the national news dailies which is a very prominent daily Indian Express, which in fact also questioned about the strikes and then brought in some reports. Their headline said India Strikes. Hindustan Times read it as a befitting response was the editorial. India hits terror hubs across LOC. Times of India, which is the most widely in fact read, it said Pakistan crossed the line, India crosses the LOC. And Economic Times said India draws the line. But if you look at the regional space in Dhaniq Jaqran, which is the largest circulator daily in the world, they said Uriqa Badla. It's a revenge for Uriq. Navbhara Times said Muthur Javab, which means jaw-breaking victory or jaw-breaking reply. Rajasthan Patrika went to the extent of patriotism to say Jai Hind Parki Chalni Chalni. You know, so it's about India and of course Pakistan has been shattered into pieces. So there was definitely newsrooms had turned into war rooms where people were wearing flag jackets, army fatigues and seen in war, you know, in almost in a war-like situation with a stick in hand actually talking about the war situations. So I would say in television, of course, you had a lot of screaming, shouting, and a certain degree of reverence to the army and the establishment with least questions asked. In the print, it was perhaps a little more stable and calm in terms of the response with some of the rightful questions asked. Yeah. So Huma, if I could turn to you and ask a similar question, what's your sense of the prevailing narratives in Pakistan at that time? And similarly, what was the relationship between the media environments and the government decision-making, specifically the decision to say this didn't happen? Sure. Thank you Toby and George and Carnegie for having me here and thank you to my co-panelists as well. Just to start with a few broad comments around this, the Pakistani media has gone through a similar sort of boom over the last 15 years. We also have over 90 privately owned television channels, hundreds of FM radio stations, a lively print culture, and this media, the adjectives that are used, ad nauseam to describe the media landscape, the broadcast media landscape in Pakistan are feisty, lively, vibrant, free. However, when it comes to security policies, particularly Pakistan-India relations and especially incidents such as Uri, the media takes quite a cautious stance and will typically take its cues from the government and in many ways serve as an amplifier of statements and messaging that are coming out of the government, the civilian government, but also and in many cases, more importantly, the military through its public relations wing. So in that sense, I think thinking about the media as a provocateur in one of these scenarios from the Pakistani perspective especially is probably not the right way to go about framing that. What the media does do is create that emotional response that I think echoes a lot of what you've heard about the Indian context, where there is this desire to create an emotional response to events, to whip up sort of nationalism, to whip up a sense of courage in the face of any kind of posturing from across the border. And in that sense, this is not the time for critical debate. The Pakistani media will engage in critical debate around things like security policies, Indo-Pak relations, but following these kinds of incident moments or these potential conflict trigger moments, you will really hear critical voices, critical of military policies, of security policies. And in that sense, you could make an argument that the media by not being thoughtful or critical creates a kind of environment in which conflict becomes palatable and there is potentially that sort of acceptance that we are in a crisis scenario that things might happen, but that we as a nation are fit to deal with this. But I would actually argue that that's typically not the way that the sort of media coverage of incidents like URI goes. What you see is a very little discussion about the technical issues of what happens during an incident and the supplies to that surgical strikes issue that came up. No one gets into the questions around what are the actual military capabilities, what is the potential for escalation, how are we equipped, how are they equipped, what is our standing security policy on this issue. What you see instead will be that if there are any illusions to escalation, it'll be more as a fantasy space, it'll be this escalation fantasy in which the Pakistan military is able to deal with any issue that might come up, that if the situation were to worsen, if conflict were to be exacerbated, that certainly Pakistan would perform well when any wars, but without any specifics attached. So I really refer to this more as a sort of fantasy scape that the media creates. But it's really important just to quickly flag up a few points. One is that the Pakistan media recognizes that much of the audience for its sort of media content around these incidents is not the Pakistani public and that the media is used as a valve to signal not only to India but also to the international community more broadly. So in many ways what you hear through Pakistani mainstream media coverage of these issues is state clues and cues to its partners abroad, its allies in the Gulf, to the United States in terms of what Pakistan is thinking around these issues. And I'm sure we can talk about that a bit more. But I also wanted to quickly fact that one of the things that you don't expect though is that humor is very common in the way that the media frames these issues. So some of that bellicosity is actually done in the spirit of generating commercial ratings. There is use of Bollywood music, there is use of role play, there is use of jokes. You'll hear a lot of the language is actually more like cricket commentary and verbal sparring rather than actual serious analysis of strategic and security issues. And my personal opinion is that what this does is start to help actually diffuse the situation where you realize that this is an infotainment space and not actually a serious media coverage of a potential crisis conflict issue. And I think that in an inadvertent way perhaps the media ends up playing the role of diffuser rather than conflict instigator. Very quickly on Uri just two points. I thought there was one thing that was really interesting after Uri was the fact that that attack took place in a particular narrative of events which was preceded by a summer of protests and growing concerns both in the region and internationally about Indian human rights violations in the Kashmir region. There was already a narrative ready for the Pakistan media space when the attack took place. One was this idea that India was now going to play up and hype the attack as a way to distract from criticism of Delhi's human rights record in Kashmir. And the other was this issue that there is enough of an issue in the region that any knee jerk response from India that blames the attack on Pakistan is unfair, knee jerk, not considered, and sort of goes to show Indian bias against Pakistan. So we saw that sort of dominant narrative play out. And once the surgical strikes took place you sort of saw two contradictory narratives which I think are quite an interesting insight into what role media tries to play. One was of course that, oh look, the attack is proof that Indian security forces and the raw intelligence are not capable of preventing such incidents from taking place. So it was sort of this implicit criticism of the capabilities of the Indian security forces and intelligence. The other narrative, although completely contradictory, was this idea that it was a staged attack that raw had in fact orchestrated the attack as a way to distract from human rights. So the fact that you can have this kind of conspiracy theorizing I think is interesting, but ultimately I would argue not necessarily a powerful trigger in the conflict context. Thank you. So Shashank, let me turn to you. I think Huma highlighted that this didn't take place in a vacuum. In fact, there's a history. And even almost a regularity to this kind of events. And in the aftermath of the surgical strikes, I'll use the quotes because we're into air quotes here as these days. There was a, some people said, well look, the Indian army has actually done this in the past. This is just the first time that the political leadership has really gone out of its way to take credit for it. So what's your sense about this particular incident and what's come before it and what might come after it? And kind of the escalation dynamic and why is it that Indian Pakistan are stuck in this situation? Yes, thank you. So thank you very much for having me. Thanks also to the co-panelists. I'm glad that Huma mentioned the summer preceding the attacks and of course we can go even wider than that and look at the beginning of the year as well to the attack because it was 2016 was a year that was bookended by attacks. And I think the first one of those, Ptankot, for those who are not South Asianists in the audience, the Ptankot attack was in January 2016 at an air base in Punjab province, not very far away from Kashmir. That was at the beginning of the year and Uri was at the end of the year. And I think they tell us different and interesting things about the role of the media and what the drivers of conflict are. If we only looked at Uri, I think we'd get some rather misleading conclusions. So let me just say before I get onto that, let me just say one thing, which is hearing Huma and Smitha, we're reminded of how fundamental communication is for deterrence and communication to adversaries to other audiences lies at the core of deterrence and compelence of course as well. And I think about that because India's done this before, right? You alluded to this, maybe not quite on the same scale, perhaps not quite drawing in as many Indian assets from the National Intelligence Service, satellite capabilities and so on. But we have seen Indian forces, special forces using militants, do it by themselves, cross over the line of control and undertake various types of actions, authorized at different levels, very often authorized at low levels by army commanders, probably sometimes also at high levels. Indeed, after the Uri attack, we had the incredible spectacle of Indian officials leaking to the major newspapers that not only had they conducted attacks across the line of control before, and Modi should not claim all the credit, but that they had beheaded Pakistani soldiers and brought their heads back as trophies as part of previous efforts at deterrence across the line of control. And we can find evidence of massacres conducted by militants employed by Indian forces to retaliate for massacres conducted by Pakistani forces in the 90s. So these are officials boasting of war crimes to show that their deterrence was even more effective than this round of deterrence. So the difference here was the decision to go public. What we have seen in the past is tacit deterrence, communication between the armed forces in the local area rather than leader to leader or media to media. And this was a novel and interesting escalation because of the decision to summon the media to Delhi with the spokesman for the Ministry of External Affairs, the director general of military operations, and to say here's what we did. The decision to communicate was a decision to change India's deterrence strategy, and we can debate how fundamental that was. And I think it's interesting to, we'll get onto this, but the role of the media in making that perhaps less risky and less explosive than it might have been. Just a very quick word on Patankot and why I think the media is not key. The media gets very angry and justifiably so after terrorist attacks on Indian soil, most of which are carried out by groups based in Pakistan which have long standing ties to the Pakistani intelligence services. I don't think any serious academic observer of South Asia would question this. But we have seen the op-ed pieces in Indian newspapers and the shows on Indian television after the attack on parliament in 2002, after the Mumbai attacks in 2008, after the Patankot attack in January 2016. But what happened in January 2016? Did we see the Indian leadership convene and a week later decide to cross the LOC? Well, perhaps privately they did, we don't know. But what actually happened was a very constructive response on both sides. We saw India hold back from immediately blaming the Pakistani state. We saw Pakistan not immediately take recourse to denying any Pakistani role in the attack. And indeed we saw the incredible situation, not only if national security advisers speaking on both sides frequently, which they didn't do in previous crises, indeed in 2008 I believe the Pakistani NSA or the ISI chief was stopped from going to Delhi to de-escalate tensions. But more than this, we saw a Pakistani investigative team visit the Indian air base. This is beginning of 2016 and the spring of 2016. So the same media environment, the same nationalistic mood, the same people clamoring for breaking Pakistan's jaw and urging the shelling of the other side. But actually the response was completely different and something that was extremely, well, encouraging and depressing, encouraging because it shows it could be done and depressing because it fell apart by the summer. Why did it fall apart? Well, I think two fundamental reasons. One of them is the Pakistani civilian government, which I think probably wanted to proceed on this track, was undermined by the armed forces. The story we've seen time and time again. And of course by the summer, Kashmir erupted in protest, completely changing the atmosphere in which the two sides could talk. So Patanko is a good example of what can happen and what can undermine it and why the media, for all of the role that it plays in shaping the environment, is not the spoiler that we think it is or it's not sufficiently a spoiler that we think it is. The media will go along. The media had a little bit of a tiff, but it didn't really stop the Modi government from allowing a Pakistani team access to an air base, which is something that not many governments would do, least of all in the context of South Asia. The other example I wanted to raise was Uri. There was a large gap between the actual attack, which was the worst attack on the Indian army in nearly 20 years, very, very serious. And therefore, in some ways, also different to previous attacks and the Indian response. Now, of course, these attacks take time, they take preparation, they take coordination and planning, but I think it shows us by the time the Indian government authorized crossing the LOC and publicly announcing it, the media had reconciled itself to the idea that the Indian response was going to be diplomatic. They had reconciled and bought the Indian government line that the strategy was isolation. We will isolate Pakistan in every forum. And they'd accepted that. No one was saying, this is totally unacceptable, you must go to war tomorrow. Yet they still took that step, which shows the media is not the principal driver of escalation or of Indian responses specifically. That is based on other calculations to do with things like the military viability, the effect they think it'll produce, domestic politics, and of course, very important, the perception of how outside third parties will respond. And the United States took a very accommodating approach to the Indian response in September. And I think that would also have shaped India's decision-making. Do I have a minute left, Toby? Is that fine? One minute. One minute, very, very quickly. I think, first of all, the media can serve as a de-escalatory force. The Pakistani media agreed with the government that nothing happened. There was no real probing to say, this is complete nonsense and clearly something happened. It wasn't made up. On the Indian side, Smith has already told us of the response. Compare that, I don't wanna bash the South Asian media. We have two very eminent, very solid journalists. We know dozens of others, but I didn't see a piece on the surgical strikes like we saw many pieces on the president's failed raid in Yemen and the lack of intelligence collected, or the disaster it was. We didn't see in-depth long pieces on that. We saw a, by and large, a consensus that everything went right for the Indians, deterrence was done. And that, of course, serves the Indian government's ends. They didn't have to release a video that would, in turn, have forced the Pakistan army's hand by embarrassing them because the media bought what the Indian government said. So this is a kind of de-escalatory pressure. Finally, very quickly, the media can play an interesting role in the amplification of signals for both good and ill. One example is the Pakistani defense minister who read a piece of fake news about a putative Israeli threat to Pakistan and decided to tweet a nuclear threat back at Israel. Wonder where he got the idea. Well, yes, this is behavior completely alien to you here in the United States, of course. The head of senior official tweeting reckless and dangerous things, but this is remarkable. This was totally fake news. On a more serious note, we can think of examples from South Asian history of where journalists have been very key conduits of messages. A.Q. Khan, who in this room needs no introduction, in 1987, gave a very important interview that conveyed a nuclear threat to India during the brass tax crisis of that year. And of course, in that era, the interview came out in the London Observer three months after the interview was given. Let's imagine how that would play out today and where the nuclear threat would pop up. It would be on Twitter in about three seconds and retweeted 800,000 times and have an immediate effect. And journalists are still important conduits to those messages, but they are not the principal drivers. Well, thank you. You've all put a number of different things on the table. I wanna pick up a couple of the strands. And in particular, I think trying to observe and make sense of what is happening in South Asia from afar through the eyes of the media in both countries is a hazardous game for an analyst. And so this idea that media can be a de-escalatory force when what we see is often promotion of escalation even if, as Huma suggests, it's a fantasy. It's a difficult concept, I think, for people here to wrestle with. As an analyst, how do you make sense of this? What is being done for the purpose of morale boosting or for nationalism? What is more sort of the credible investigative journalism that one should trust as an analyst? It's really hard. Smita, what's your sense? Huma has suggested that a lot of the escalation talk is kind of a bit of a fantasy. And I braved one Indian TV show while I was in Delhi last September. And I think I was one of six heads on the screen at any given time shouting at you. It was great. But what's your sense about kind of the fantasy of escalation? If we think about what happens beyond or a now, this is a thing, this has happened. There's this response. I think if you were to take a wager amongst analysts, an event like this seems probable, happen again in the future. How can you imagine the media engaging in this again? You know, a couple of points. Shashank mentioned the Pathan Kott attacks. What we also need to remember was Pathan Kott was a disappointment because just in December of 2015, Pathan Kott attack happened on 7th of January, 2016. On 25th December, 2015, Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister who was on a visit to Afghanistan, made an unscheduled visit to Lahore, stopped over, met with the Pakistani prime minister who was busy with the family wedding. Nobody had a clue in the Indian media that this was going to happen. And we learned about it from a tweet when Narendra Modi said, I'm now on my way to Lahore. And we've been like- I'm sensing a theme about Twitter here. Yeah, I guess more than foreign affairs editor, you really need like Twitter affairs editors these days. So that's one prime position. But, see, I guess a lot of things depend on the kind of government that you're dealing with, the kind of prime minister that you're dealing with. If this wasn't Narendra Modi, if this was his predecessor, Manmohan Singh, who had done it, I doubt how media would have lapped up that story and would have perhaps ripped him off by asking a lot of questions because it differs what kind of mandate is that leadership really enjoying. Just a couple of weeks prior to that we had seen, a lot of times, you know, media is blamed for noise and disruptions. But the NSA, Ajit Doval, actually flew into Bangkok and held secret talks, which lasted for six hours with his Pakistani counterpart, Nasir Janjua. Again, something, nobody had a whiff of, only at the end of the day when a press release came out did the media get to know, oh, India and Pakistan have held secret six-hour talks in Bangkok. But despite those talks, despite the supposition that the two NSAs had got along really well, there were poetry exchanges and apparently they were on WhatsApp and text messages, you still saw the India Park graph go down within a couple of months itself, which perhaps makes me agree with Shashank that you cannot blame media for policy failures. Yes, media is used for a certain propagation of a narrative. Media is used for a communication tool. And in India-Pakistan, you know, in my last 14 years of journalism, I've traveled to some of the most exotic locations to cover the India Park story from Bhutan to Maldives. But every time the summits have been built up with great euphoria and have led to severe disappointments, media has been blamed for a lot of it, which I do not agree with. In Sharmal Sheikh, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met with Yusuf Raza Ghilani, and it was the first time that the Sharmal Sheikh statement had a mention of Balochistan in the joint communique. Media is blamed for that statement, that meeting going wrong. But actually, it was the Congress party itself that had problems with Manmohan Singh having agreed to the word Balochistan in the communique. And when the politicians started sort of raising those questions, media carried it on. Similarly, in Pakistan, yes, there were a lot of questions raised. And we saw where that communique landed and there was a lot of disappointment. Pierce Robinson has a paper called The CNN Effect, which argues this very question, whether the media really has a direct impact when it comes to foreign policy issues. And the paper mostly sees that on humanitarian issues, yes, media might have a certain degree of influence, but there also, if you're wanting a government to intervene on humanitarian issues in a country, say like Iraq, they will do their body back counting before the government gives into the media pressure. It might be a lot of public pressure. But on foreign policy, it depends on what the government looks like at the moment in power. If they want to go out with certain things, yes, the media can build a lot of public pressure, a lot of public opinion can be communicated through it. But I guess if a government wants to do something, they'll go ahead with it, regardless. Well, let's pick up this thread. And in particular, I want to get into kind of the segmentation and speed of media now. And what's your sense about how that has changed the reporting environment for these kinds of things? Now that you have government officials announcing things by Twitter and so much of the discussion happening, not just in print or even on TV now, but over social media. I think that one of the key things that has happened is that both the political and the military sort of stakeholders in Pakistan, certainly I think it's true in India as well, have become much more savvy recognizing that their output on things like social media on Twitter, the sort of quick unnamed sources, press releases that they can put out will be picked up by a media landscape that knows that it has to comment, that feels the pressure, but at the same time that is looking for those cues. So one of the things that we're starting to see is just greater consistency in that emotional response that comes across. There used to be a time when sort of coverage of these incidents would be very haphazard for a day or two after they happened with people taking different conspiracy theories, someone calling for war, someone calling for restraint. That kind of multiplicity of voices now after one of these crisis incidents I think is reducing. There is another angle to that though is that because the clear messaging from state actors and key stakeholders comes out through their own media production, the dissenting voices feel that there's less space to sort of start challenging a dominant narrative that gets put in place very, very quickly. And I'm talking about within hours, if not minutes. So to find any opportunity to be able to have that either more state view or to be critical of some of the stances that have been taken on, I think that space starts to get limited. And one of the things that's interesting is that this is not necessarily a censorship issue. It becomes an issue of two things. One is of course the commercial ratings pressure where as Smitha and I have both sort of indicated the ultimate goal of these media channels is not to participate in peace building or conflict escalation, it is to get people to tune in. They are looking at their ratings. They see these incidents as opportunities to get viewers to tune in and stay tuned in. When you're chasing ratings, you want to get people on air who are going to say the kinds of things that will keep emotions alive, that will keep people tuned in. You don't want stayed voices on air at that point. So I think that's one of the reasons it's not only a sort of censorship or sinister reason that leads to the dissenting voice getting pushed out in those moments. The other, and this is something that I think we can't emphasize enough, is that the growth of the media industry in both India and Pakistan has been so rapid. In Pakistan we went from a state in 2002 where we had just under 2,000 journalists to one now which has more than 27,000 journalists. So the caliber of people, the profile of people who are engaging in media production has become much more diverse, younger, less experienced, less informed in some ways and yet more empowered. And so you don't really, what you're starting to see is genuine reflections of how people think about these issues, the very raw emotional reflection of what that society is thinking. And so I think that we should be aware of the fact that actually this media coverage can be a really useful way as Meeta has already said to understand public sentiment. I want to flip this question on its head and I'm sure there's a couple points you'd like to pick up on Xiaoshan, but we've talked about media escalation. Can we also talk a little bit about media and peace building? And in particular, at this point, it seems like peace is a contrary narrative in South Asia and we don't see a lot of space for narratives that would support a process to help manage and even potentially resolve some of these issues and I'm curious why that is and is it a function of the infotainment environment? Is it a function of particular political actors that would tend to support peace not having the same kind of airtime or being able to utilize media in the same way? I think it's, the issues that we're dealing with here, what does peacemaking mean? Think about the issues that divide the countries. The core issue for India is state-sponsored terrorism and the core issue for Pakistan is the dispute over Kashmir in India's control over two-thirds of Kashmir, including the Kashmir Valley. These are not issues where it's very easy to suggest compromises or changes either because it's such a sensitive, historical and deep-rooted issue or in some cases in the Pakistani case because of course it involves compromises on things you say you're not doing. It's not easy for some Pakistani diplomat, even a retired diplomat, to say, I propose that we wind down the use of Lashkar-e-Taiber and allow it to maintain enormous facilities in the middle of our key state because that would be to undercut what the claims you've been making for decades. So this, I do wonder whether the media really is the actor we need to be thinking of in the context of peace-building. When I think of one of the most effective periods of India-Pakistan dialogue in the past 30 or so years, it is not the summits at Agra or Lahore or things like this with Prime Ministers conducting trips with great fanfare to others' capitals. It's the back channel that took place between 2004 and 2007 with the governments of President Musharraf and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, which took place almost entirely in the shadows. And that is a forum in which the two sides can broach sensitive issues, including what would effectively be either the loss of territory or changes to border controls and border agreements and how porous those borders would be in effectively a safe environment where they're not going to be crucified by leaks on Twitter the next day. I think, it's interesting what I think of when I think about this is the debate we've had this week in this country over Rex Tillerson, not taking the press pool to Asia. And of course there are corrosive effects of blocking the media out from the reporting of day-to-day diplomacy. I can emphasize with the American press. Yeah, and of course, Smith, you've reported under constraints of a centralizing Prime Minister who is not always very open to the media. But actually for some cases that are as deep-rooted as Kashmir, for example, where any territorial compromise would involve acts of parliament on the Indian side, these things need to take place in a safe, quiet environment. Do you two agree with that point? Do you have? You know, I guess there are a couple of things that are happening which are true and I'm glad, in fact, he mentioned the Tillerson thing because we see these uncanny resemblances across the world's oldest democracy and the largest democracy today even when it comes to the government's attitude towards the media. What has happened is with the media expansion. You know, now while in America here, of course, newsrooms are shrinking but digital has expanded. In India you have television, print, digital coexisting. It's a hungry media. It needs to put out stories but having said that, the governments have their own way of trying to go into constituencies and gauging the public mood not necessarily through the media. So in both the countries where we see a sort of discrediting of an attempt to try and discredit media that happens from the level of the government itself, the message sent out more often than not is we do not need you. We will come to you only when there is a certain message that is in our interest that we want to put out. Otherwise we have Twitter, otherwise we have other options and it's not necessary for us to do regular press conferences. It's not necessary for us to do interviews. We'll sit down for an interview with people who we think will help us put out our message. That's happened. The other thing is of course with the rise of nationalism across the globe now. This entire definition of nationalism that we are dealing with. Governments are now choosing to be politically incorrect. They don't have to be politically correct. We are seeing that in India. And they are willing to take a certain kind of step forward which they think might be rejected by the media but it doesn't really matter. So for the media then for a large section of which in a way when it comes to the army, the defense issues dealing with the pain of terrorism. Unfortunately what happens is a lot of time it's war that sells on media, it's hatred that sells on media, it's raw emotions following an act of terror where you want to bring out that pain and tragedy that sells on media. And there is some degree of self-censorship that also happens within the journalists themselves but will the situation between India and Pakistan change post and we've seen worse. I guess we've seen the Kargil attacks. You've seen the buildup in 2002 of Operation Parakram where India wasted millions of dollars in actually having its armed forces on the borders, mounting them there but the government, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government of that time was criticized for not actually allowing the army, the clearance to move forward. So there have been instances of India, Pakistan, the up-down story. One moment the leaders are hugging each other, they're having biryani together. The other moment it's a complete cutty. You know missy what that boy is doing, I don't want to talk to that person. There can be a way forward, media will deal with it in its own way, media can go and shout and fight with each other but if the government wants to go ahead with a peace process and peace building process they will find their own way. I wanna start to bring in the audience and so if those of you who will have questions wanna start making your way towards the microphones I'll come to you in just a second. But first I wanna ask one last question given that this is a nuclear policy conference so we need to address the nuclear aspect of this just a little bit. And I'm curious what your sense is of the kind of quality and information of reporting on nuclear issues by South Asian media. You know where does the information come from? How is the credibility of that information assessed? Is it assessed at all? Is it just sort of conveyed wholesale based on what the government says? And then to pick up a point that both Huma and Shashank raised about the signaling aspect of this too. I mean we see a lot of deterrent signaling messages of resolve threats, some of it for domestic audiences, some of it for audiences across the border, some of it for international audiences. Yeah, how does that all fit together in this picture too? Huma you wanna start? Sure. In terms of coverage of nuclear issues I would say it's minimal. It's certainly not sophisticated, it doesn't resemble anything like the science journalism that you might find in publications here. But also moving beyond sort of actual sort of investigative journalism into things like technical capabilities, et cetera which is non-existent, both owing to a lack of capacity on the part of journalists covering these issues but also because of just general consensus that state security policies and particularly issues around defense and defense capability remain no-go zones for the mainstream press. I think that when you do hear talk in the Pakistani media about nuclear issues it tends to be in that emotional space where the bomb is still this, it's not talked about in these terms but essentially what people are talking about is the deterrence aspect, the fact that now that we have it nothing will ever happen and we have it and we can use it if we need to. And you don't really get, it's just seen as a way of celebrating Pakistan's technological competence, the fact that it has been self-sufficient in achieving this point. So it becomes, as I say it enters that fantasy space where no one is actually breaking down what the consequences of that use would be so you rarely see follow up. But at the same time I think, and it's worth just putting this in context is that you actually do get quite critical conversations about India-Pakistan relations and possibilities for peace and how talks et cetera should progress through the course of a year for example, where there can be actually very sophisticated discussion about the political dynamics of potential conflict issues. Looking at really interesting unpacking of domestic political drivers within Pakistan, within India, things like budget expenditure, like could we actually around arms race, you do get really sophisticated analysis on those issues but you will not get that at the time of an incident or at the time of a sort of emotive security moment that could go either way. That is left for the good times when everyone is hugging and having biryani. So I think one of the things to remember is that this is a media landscape that is under no pressure at all to be consistent in its ideological positioning or argumentation. So the ups and downs in the relationship are sort of echoed by a parallel or mirror up and down in the media coverage where you could be much more critical and much more analytical, the better things are. Do you want to? Yeah. I think a lot of the nuclear coverage is also event based. Say for instance, when India was entering into the civil nuclear cooperation of the United States and signed upon the one, two, three agreement, you suddenly obviously had a lot of dialogue around that issue in media because people weren't aware. What is this that you're talking about? You know, they have bread and butter issues that they are dealing with politics sells in India much more and you're dealing with a diverse audience, you know, the Hindi Heartland belt to the Southern belt, which is a little more sophisticated. So for foreign policy editors like us or reporters like us, the challenge is how do you break down that story and simplify it? The Indian bid for the nuclear supplies group, there were only two journalists who went into Seoul, including myself, to cover that story. The other news organizations clearly thought it wasn't important enough, but had the Indian prime minister travel there, you would have perhaps seen an entire contingent traveling on their own, you know, to try and cover that story. So I guess it's a story which is very hard to sell and the analysis is left essentially to former diplomats, ambassadors, and scholars like Shashank to contribute and explain what's really happening on nuclear security. So Shashank, explain. Well, I think, look, the reporting is mostly if the variety of this new missile can hit Shanghai. Would you know, but that's, you know, and it's generally of a poor quality in terms of what it adds to the press release given out by the defense research and development organization or whatever else or the space research organization. What there is, as you suggest, is a thriving debate and it is an adversarial debate on sometimes very sophisticated nuclear issues in the elite English language print media, which let's not pretend is the core of the influence point of the Indian media, and on new online platforms like The Wire, which is a very intelligent platform. And it is cerebral, it is interesting, it is in depth. And, you know, to some extent we flatter ourselves by saying that because I can, there are half a dozen people in the audience who are regular contributors to Indian and Pakistani columns. And I'm pretty sure that if I compared editorials and commentary in the American press in the last 15 years or the British press, the number of articles we would find on very in-depth subjects like IAEA safeguarding or, you know, fast breeder reactors or whatever else, or on the subtle points of no first use and crisis escalation would be considerably bigger in India than anywhere else. So, yes, there's a kind of reactive simplification on the reporting side, but on the analysis side, on the commentary side, there's a really impressive debate that we can't ignore and it cuts both ways. On the nuclear deal, people who thought the nuclear deal was terrible for India, people who thought it was absolutely fantastic. And generally informed by retired officials, academic scholars and so on. Yeah, if there are questions, I'd be happy to entertain them. Now I've got many questions, I'm happy to go on talking, but if you have questions, please make your way to the two microphones that are in the aisles, one there and one there. While people are doing that. Shashank, I wonder if I could sort of pose to you a point that Vipin Narang made earlier today about changes in India's nuclear posture and wonder if you've also sensed that. And in particular, do you see analysis in the Indian media that would support the contention that India's nuclear doctrine or posture is changing in ways that might make crisis escalation, in particular the incentives to use nuclear weapons first a little bit more dangerous? Well, there's been a bubbling debate over Indian nuclear doctrine since the 2000s. It was revised as you heard this morning in 2003 to allow for chemical and biological weapons use response. And there have always been calls for change. Most of these have focused on two aspects. One of them has focused on no first use and whether India should modify no first use. And the other one has focused on massive retaliation. Should India continue to persist in the doctrine that it will respond massively? Or is that incredible? Is it incredible to say if you attack our tank columns we will destroy the whore? What I think Vipin has highlighted in a very interesting way is that there's a third axis of debate which he has identified in this book by the former national security advisor to say that the debate is also about what the target should be. Should we focus on counter value strikes which were the mainstay of Indian doctrine for 18 years? Or in fact, if India is going to think about preemption, if India is going to respond massively to a Pakistani tactical nuclear strike, why should it not focus on damage limitation? And therefore why should it not shift to counter force? What worries me of course is that this does several things. It incentivizes a much bigger Pakistani buildup to encourage survivability. It encourages first strike instability because no one wants to go second if they think the other will go first. And of course what it does on the Indian side is it guarantees the loss of Indian cities given that no Indian strike will be completely and successfully disarming rather than merely risking the loss of Indian cities. So I think I'm not as convinced perhaps as Vipin that this is necessarily the direction of travel but I think he's absolutely right to say that this debate by very serious people is a kind of Indian signaling to the rest of us. They don't have a nuclear posture review. They can't do their signaling in the way other countries do it. Therefore they have to do it by the speeches of retired eminent officials. That's interesting. So we'll start with a question over here. Please speak clearly into the microphone and identify yourself and briefly ask your question. I am Ambassador Sarwar Naqvi from Pakistan, Executive Director of the Center for National Strategic Studies. This is a very parochial subject I think. It's basically something that interests the Saudisians much more than others but maybe because of the portentous implications of what's happening in South Asia is of concern to the world. I think it would interest others as well. Anyway, I just want to make one or two observations and then ask the question, Toby, if you allow me. I met Henry... The observation is brief. Yeah, very brief. I met Henry Kissinger in New York many years ago and I talked about the Pakistan position on everything. And at the end of it, Dr. Kissinger said, when the Pakistanis complain about India three-fourths of the time, it's understandable. You are smaller, you are weaker and you worry about your security. But when the Indians complain about Pakistan three-fourths of the time, they are bigger, they are stronger. It's weird, he said. It's weird. So, you know, we are in that kind of strange psyche of dealing with each other in this manner. That's my observation. As regards the media and the wars of words, you talked about braving the Indian media. Sometimes I am called to Indian television when I am sitting in Islamabad. And the way they lash out at Pakistan, hurling acquisitions and allegations, it's incredible. I was once pulled out of a New Year's Eve party in 2015 where they said that a terrorist boat had been caught in the Arabian Sea, which was full of terrorists with arms and ammunition. Actually, these were smugglers who had some arms and they were smuggling liquor. But the Indian press went wild over it. So I think, you know, the Indian media and the Pakistani media can also try to do some peacemaking. And that would have to be an effort because the tendency of the media is to sensationalize, to sell. But in our peculiar context, it is incumbent upon the media to think about peacemaking. I want the comments of the two very experienced journalists on what I'm saying. Thank you. Do you want to take a question tonight? Yeah, why don't you hold here and why don't we take the question over here as well. By the way, just an aside, I can't recall a Carnegie conference in which the first day we've had so many mentions of Henry Kissinger. I'm perplexed by this, but please, go ahead. Hello, my name is Thoreau Jermain-Star. I'm sitting here with Foxtrot Alpha, right about military and national security and missile defense, et cetera. My question is how engaged are Pakistani and Indian audiences when it comes to conversations about nuclear weapons and development? Can you be more specific about what do you mean by nuclear weapons and development? Okay, so basically the conversation about all we've discussed today. And so for the journalists, my question is how many people actually respond to reporting and coverage of nuclear issues between the two countries? Because I know here it tends to be more a niche conversation, perhaps because of our geography and circumstances like that, but are the issues more intimate between the two countries? And so I just wanted to understand the difference based on your... So I think there's actually a commonality in both of these questions, which is about what sells? And does peacemaking sell? Does coverage of nuclear issues sell? How does the media engage both of these issues and how do readers engage these issues? To your question, I would say it's minuscule if you were to compare it to the level of interest one would see in cricket, in the domestic politics, in Bollywood. It's absolutely minuscule. Sometimes you have to go and fight it out with the editor because you tell your editor, listen, this is a serious story, I need to do it. And the editor will turn around and say, you'll not get even five viewers. What do you do about it? So because the demography is different, the educated levels, the levels of education are different and the challenges are different. As I mentioned, it's bread butter issues that are much more important. To your question, Ambassador, first of all, Huma and Neville definitely have dinner tonight and make peace, but on a personal level, I have some of my best friends in the Pakistani media. And clearly neither the Indian nor the Pakistani media can claim to be holier than thou. You face that shouting and screaming with the Indian studios. I remember once seeing this report, India and Pakistan on the land border of Vaga and Atari, they have this ridiculous flag lowering down ceremony where there is a lot of if I may use the word belligerence inside of the two armies who march almost like with daggers drawn. I don't know why we have that ceremony. There was once a report on Geo news where the anchor actually, there was a visual of a cloud which had formed on the Indian side of the border which looked like Pakistan. And the anchor went on to say that there is in Pakistani cloud that's formed on the Indian side of the border. This is a divine message that Pakistan rules. So figure it out whatever it meant. If there was a report of that's bought with terrorists but it was reports in the Indian media itself that again went out and debunked that government theory and said that no, they were not terrorists, they were smugglers. So I guess it's a case of having rotten apples on both the sides. We have the group called Times of India. The print circulation runs a campaign called Aman Ki Asha, which is the hope for peace. And its television station is the biggest willing to any chances of peace. So if you look at the TV station you'll think that India and Pakistan can never be friends. So there are these contradictions that do exist but a lot of it is, as Huma mentioned, it's more driven by commercial interests than by real practical policy understanding. I would just add to that to say that there's a really interesting effect coming out of this jingoistic media culture and this is certainly true on the Pakistani side where one of the things that happens is that as Indian media, particularly mainstream Hindi language television channels whip up this anti-Bhaktan frenzy, in the Pakistani media discourse, the Indian media becomes the problem, not the Indian state. And you start to see this deflection, this sort of sense that any kind of policies that we're seeing, the so-called surgical strikes, et cetera, are performative acts that have much more to do with a domestic Indian space, that it's a government performing for bloodthirsty, jingoistic Indian media. And what this starts to do is separate the need for Pakistan to really get involved. And I think that starts to actually create an environment in which you can have a sort of pressure valve releasing where the Pakistani media criticism and policy discussions will shift from that of Indian state belligerents and, you know, Modi's security policy shift in with regard to retaliating, et cetera, and instead start focusing on the fact that the Indian media is a flawed media landscape, that the industry has bigger problems at Pakistan's media industry. And I think that that's actually leading to a really interesting, as I say, it sort of starts, it's where that point always turns in the way that Pakistani media covers these tense issues is that you see a shift from state to media industry, which I think is a really interesting phenomenon that this whole landscape enables. The other thing I wanted to just sort of add to Smita sort of touched on it, but as I said, there's the conflict time and then the rest of the time. And I think actually the media is playing a really interesting role in helping bring more Indian voices into Pakistani homes. The fact that we have sophisticated television channels on both sides of the border that can now stream Pakistani analysts, get them on air on the Indian side and vice versa, Pakistani channels reaching out to Indian analysts, at least we're starting to see a bit of a dialogue or to start hearing voices that otherwise in a previous circumstance, the state could completely block out. And all of this current affairs and news media coverage is happening in a broader context of growing cooperation in the entertainment space, in the music space, in the film space where actually there's a lot of support for increased collaboration between Indian artists and Pakistani artists. And in fact, much of the conversation about Uri was overshadowed within Pakistan where the decision to ban Indian Bollywood films and Pakistani cinemas, and you saw a much livelier and more emotional debate about the films being banned rather than anything to do with conflict escalation. So I think that there's a lot of potential for that sort of people to people connectivity that both Indian and Pakistani governments love to talk about through this media space when it's not possible in real time. And just to go to your quick point on audiences, I think one thing that it's worth emphasizing here is that India is a slightly more sophisticated market but by no means there yet and Pakistan is not in terms of gathering audience research data. So for all that we've said about ratings, et cetera, we don't really know what the public, the South Asian public is clamoring for around this issue. I suspect that there would probably be more interest in a more reasoned debate, certainly for more information but the ratings culture that we have is one that's very limited, it's sort of skewed towards certain urban neighborhoods, it's manipulated, the reliability of the data is very poor. So I think one of the most interesting things that the industry can think about going forward is trying to better understand what really does sell. You know, we're guessing that war sells but the genuine truth is we probably don't know the answer. Very brief and then we'll take the last set up. Very briefly, just to say that for all of this competitive nationalism, isn't it interesting that no one in the Indian media or the Indian public really care that India has 20 to 30 fewer nuclear weapons than Pakistan which you would have thought would be a point of contention, an issue of pride, an issue of prestige, something that would be the first thing to come up in discussions of these types. It doesn't matter, it doesn't come up and I just come back to the original point which is the media is the epiphenomenon, it's not the underlying issue. It's just not as relevant as we think it is. Yeah, that's the interesting point. Two questions here and then we'll wrap up briefly. Thanks, Mark Fitzpatrick, International Institute for Strategic Studies. I got up to ask my question before Shahshank started referring to V. Ping Narang's comments this morning. Very glad that you did because everything I've heard today, that was the most alarming that India might break its no first use policy and massively attack Pakistan. That's a very strong scenario. And so my question to the journalists is, is that going to be front page news tomorrow in your countries or eight page? I mean, it's going to destroy a lot of cricket pitches. At the least, yes. Very last question. Jonathan Ward, University of Oxford. Samedha, you mentioned at the beginning that there's the focus in Indian media on China and Pakistan and I was wondering if the panel could sort of share some observations on a sort of compare and contrast of China and Pakistan in Indian media. It'd be great to hear your observations. Thank you. So I'm going to give each of you like 30 seconds to answer these two questions. So Shahshank, why don't you start with Mark's question? Sure, I mean, well, I submitted a piece on this to the Indian Express yesterday. So if you're listening, Indian Express comment editor, then please publish this, but it won't be on the front page. I mean, I think what's interesting here is that what Vipin was drawing from was in plain sight. It was in a book by the former national security advisor that came out last year. I reviewed it for India today and I talked about what I thought were the worrying changes he was describing, which was specifically the concept of preemption, but I didn't spot what Vipin spotted, which was it wasn't just preemption, it was an additional commitment to explore the possibility or what he saw as the incentive to also shift a counterforce. So one of the issues is that this wasn't in a speech, it wasn't in a big press release. It was in a niche book that was read by a fairly modest strategic community. And I think the signals are only trickling out once we absorb this. But what is very interesting is that journalists like Smitha and others who I've met, they are very interested in absorbing this and writing about it. So there's a group of technically informed journalists who are putting this. And no, it won't be on the front page, but they will write it up on the comment pages. And that's better than nothing. I was just gonna say that this is the kind of thing that Ashish and Smitha have said. It'll get some low level commentary and certain English language newspapers and the books and authors sections, those kinds of things. But it will get saved up to be blown out of proportion and taken out of context in the event of a future moment where there is the need to hype up that sense of nationalism, to create that sense of fear, to justify certain military decisions. So it's the kind of thing that the Pakistani generalistic community will not risk taking on and analyzing and discussing because they don't have those cues from government regarding how they should be discussing this issue. But it is one that will get saved up. The thing that's changing, and we didn't really talk about this much, is we now live in a social media saturated world where you could end up seeing a scenario in which someone here sends out an inflammatory tweet summarizing this entire conversation in a very different way. And that leads to a really emotional media coverage out of context, which would then require the state to respond to it. So there's always that possibility increasingly now of sort of that social media wild card that disrupts the way that the mainstream media would traditionally cover these kinds of academic development. Like, I agree, this is not going to be page one. This wasn't even page one when the Indian Defense Minister Manohar Parikar came on the record, who is now the Chief Minister of a state. And he said that we're not shy away from exercising the nuclear button. It wasn't something that people questioned. On the contrary, you'll see that vericosity across headlines saying that India will not shy away, India will give a slap on the face of Pakistan. That's the kind of language that you'll come across for the gentlemen who asked in terms of the reporting language. I think the sharpest difference is that when you talk about Pakistan most of the time, there was a period in between where actually it was the idea of the other, the good cultural stories that made headlines about Pakistan in Indian media. No more, it's essentially about terrorism, terrorism and Pakistan being a state sponsor of terrorism. That's the narrative mostly, the language much, much more sharper and low level in television compared to print. But on China, the stories are essentially about a sense of prestige and competition for that space in a changing world order, especially as superpowers in Asia. So it will really be about China obstructing India's seat on the nuclear suppliers group table, or it will be about China-Pakistan alliance, the China-Pakistan economic corridor, China trying to protect terrorists in the United Nations Security Council who are based in Pakistan. So that's the kind of language you use, but I guess ultimately we'll have to find a kind of a new normal where television is much more younger in India compared to print media. They are going through an evolution process themselves and I can tell you that there is a lot of self-flagellation that happens too. So it's not like there's no introspection happening, hopefully this will lead to much more matured reporting in the days to come. We can hope. Before we let you go, we very much need your help in testing out the technology that we're going to use for the polling session tomorrow. So if I could ask your indulgence to open up the conference app, if you click on the menu piece of it in the upper left-hand corner, you'll scroll down to Agenda. And then once you're at the agenda for today, March 20th, scroll down until you're in the concurrent session two and then click on that session, Wars of Words. And once that panel page comes up, you scroll all the way to the bottom and you see something called Live Poll. If you click on that, you now see a poll before you. The question is? Doesn't open. It opened for me. It's working. Try it again. So the question is, what is the likelihood that by March 20th of 2019, so if we were to imagine that the Carnegie Conference in 2019 were to take place exactly two years from now, so what is the likelihood that two years from now, India and Pakistan will have resumed a comprehensive dialogue. And so then you see a number of percentages in front of you if you could choose which percentage you think is the best approximation and then cast your vote. And we'll give you just a minute to complete that and then we'll show the results on the page. Okay, everybody got it? We'll close the voting. And can we see the results? All over the place. But it appears 30 to 40% is the mostly consensus view. So if we've contributed nothing else today, it's that 30 to 40% is the prospect given for the resumption of a comprehensive dialogue in the next two years. Hopefully which, or has it changed now? If it has to happen, it will happen now, not 2019. That's the year when India goes to elections. Between now and 2019. Actually, yes. Yes, good. Well, we can hope that if that happens that the media in South Asia will have contributed to this positive outcome. Please join me in thanking the great panel today. I really appreciate the discussion.