Political scientist Christopher Clary made these comments on this week’s episode of Grand Tamasha, a podcast co-produced by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Hindustan Times and hosted by Carnegie’s Milan Vaishnav.

The India-Pakistan relationship has often been described as a “conflict unending” but political scientist Christopher Clary says this characterization is highly misleading. Clary made these comments on this week’s episode of Grand Tamasha, a podcast co-produced by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Hindustan Times and hosted by Carnegie’s Milan Vaishnav.

Clary is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany in the United States and author of a new book, The Difficult Politics of Peace: Rivalry in Modern South Asia, which suggests that the traditional doom-and-gloom narrative of Indo-Pak ties glosses over a rich history of cooperation, contestation, conflict, and conciliation that defies easy explanations.

“The leaders on both sides have managed to achieve a lot. We focus on the things they have not achieved”, like the Kashmir dispute, Clary explained. While in 1947, few of the disputed borders were defined, nearly all of them are today. “At many points in the relationship, trade has been ok. At many points, there’s been law enforcement cooperation…and we have a serious flooding situation now in Pakistan, and it would not surprise me at all if India and Pakistan find a way to have tangible aid that makes the lives better of poor Pakistanis that have been affected by the incredible floods,” said Clary.

Clary previously served in the US Office of the Secretary of Defence where he helped manage the India account. This experience, he said, had a defining impact on his career and outlook. Clary said it led him to believe that the single biggest variable shaping India-Pakistan relations was the primacy leaders are (or are not) able to achieve over their own systems. According to Clary’s book, the degree that a state will be responsive to strategic incentives will vary based on the presence or absence of concentrated foreign policy authority within a state, or “leader primacy”, in his words.

The centrality of concentrated executive authority, and its absence in Pakistan, is the principal reason we should be pessimistic about the near-term prospects of peace between India and Pakistan, says Clary. “If there is anything that is the opposite of leader primacy, it is the current situation in Pakistan. It is almost impossible for me to imagine this system being able to sustain negotiations with India…because every day is dealing with the politics of perpetual crisis,” noted Clary. He contrasted this with the situation in India where Prime Minister Narendra Modi does have the “political capital in the Indian system to achieve big things” even if he faces ideological challenges from within his own party to pushing for peace on the Indo-Pak front.

Christopher Clary is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany in the United States