WHEN Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif called up Prime Minister Narendra Modi to commiserate on the Pathankot air base attack, it was a déjà vu moment. The same effusiveness was in full play about seven years back when the Mumbai attacks had rocked India. The then Pakistani President Asif Zardari had even offered to send the ISI chief to discuss the extent of culpability of rogue officers in the military while top Lashkar-e-Taiba commanders, including its ideologue Hafiz Saeed, were jailed and a special anti-terrorist court set for their speedy prosecution.This was unprecedented in Indo-Pak cooperation on terrorism. The offers yielded little because the Pakistani military’s strategy of using militants in Afghanistan and India at that time kept their intelligence agencies busy from exerting a similar counter-pressure.Three years after the Mumbai attacks, Pakistani public perception of its military’s prowess took a beating when US marines came and killed Osama bin Laden, and then, half of Pakistan’s maritime surveillance fleet got decimated in the Mehran air base attack that exposed the involvement of men in uniform.There was a window of opportunity in 2011 but the Zardari-controlled Pakistan People’s Party’s was unable to deliver on its promise to swiftly prosecute the Mumbai attack masterminds. Is it different now? Can Nawaz Sharif act on his promise given to Narendra Modi? Just over a week before the Foreign Secretaries of both countries are slated to meet in Islamabad, New Delhi seems to have taken the Pakistan Prime Minister on his word and added a few conditions of its own. One of them appears to be the arrest of Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar of the Kathmandu-Kandahar plane hijack notoriety who has remained unprosecuted for the crime for 16 years.The state of play in Pakistan that encouraged Nawaz Sharif to make the “assurance” looks more promising than during Zardari’s tenure as Pakistan President. Nawaz Sharif’s third-time ascension as Prime Minister is unprecedented in the annals of leadership turnover in Pakistan. This was the only occasion when a democratic government completed its mandate of five years in office and gave way to another of the same make. The consequent ebb in the political clout of the Pakistan military has led to the democratic government getting a firmer handle on the tools of governance and policy making than its earlier predecessors.But the Indian Government could be indulging in an over-optimistic reading of tea leaves in the Pakistani security apparatus when National Security Adviser Ajit Doval crafted a stern message of take it or leave it to Nawaz Sharif. In a signal via the media, Doval claims that India has handed over all evidence, including phone intercepts, mobile phone numbers of the handlers behind the Pathankot attack, along with their names and locations. All of this again sounds familiar. India had gone through exactly the same drill after the Mumbai attacks. The then civilian government in Pakistan, a couple of shades more secular than Nawaz Sharif and therefore less complicit with radical groups, tried hard to deliver. The other side strove equally hard to thwart this attempt. When all else failed, the lawyer prosecuting the seven masterminds of the Mumbai attacks was shot dead. His successor also died mysteriously. The rapid-fire conclusion by Indian media commentators detected the ISI’s hand.It is not as straightforward and uncomplicated. A large section of Pakistan society is radicalised and tends to subscribe to the methods and philosophy of the radicals. This is mainly due to the unwillingness of all governments, both military and democratically elected, to change the intensely feudal and crony dominated arrangement at the top and intermediate layers. This setup has rarely allowed the subaltern to join them in governance and policy making, leading them to view the radicals as some sort of a revolutionary force that could give them deliverance from perpetual political subjugation by the landlords-cum-industrialists from Raiwind (the Sharif clan), Larkana (the Bhutto family) and several like them who get co-opted in Central Cabinets.The era of socialist and Left activism, the main drivers for resolving this structural problem and providing a solution, is over. India has continuously accommodated the less deprived by tools such as reservations and should understand this flaw better than the Europeans and the Americans who undertook other means, including domination of resource-rich nations, to keep their citizen satiated. Neither Pakistan nor India can ever resort to this technique perfected by the West for over four centuries. It is the Pakistani elite’s incapacity to effect changes in the system that draws its youth to the aesthetics of violence and self-destruction.India’s security managers in New Delhi’s South Block could take heart from the halving of terrorist attacks in Pakistan last year as compared to the previous year. Yet the country continues to host, often against its interests, a medley of violence-addicted groups who have the ability to turn the clock back on the current spell of sociability between the two Prime Ministers.  For example, Pakistan marked the end of the year with the murder of its top anti-terrorism manager in Punjab and a blast that killed 29. Both were suspected to be the handiwork of groups operating independently of Pakistani military and intelligence agencies. Much like the Mumbai attacks, they were assisted by some former military officials who had branched out after Pervez Musharraf’s post 9/11 U-turn on using militant groups in Afghanistan. Some militant groups also began attacking their former mentors in the military after Musharraf’s ceasefire with India in 2004 had bottled up the Kashmir channel.If the bonhomie between the two establishments is for real, Doval’s conditionalities should maintain the pressure on Islamabad-Rawalpindi to keep in check India-focussed vendors of violence. But it will be unrealistic to expect a total cessation. Instead the leaderships of India and Pakistan need to turn their attention to policies that produce economic deliverance for their people. For India that would mean shorter trade routes for its merchandise exports into Central Asia and Afghanistan.For Pakistan, it should translate into access to energy and increase in the domestic investment rate to wean it from perpetual dependence on foreign aid which makes it susceptible to tutoring from the benefactors. Nawaz Sharif is best placed to deliver near-total peace with India. Not only is the international opinion ranged against military takeovers, Nawaz Sharif is a major beneficiary of the Zardari government’s annulment of a Constitution provision authorising the President to remove the Prime Minister. But India must move on multiple fronts with Pakistan. Holding it accountable only to the metric of terror will be insufficient and impractical.