India, Jan. 11 -- Mani Shankar Aiyar is, in Tamil English, a "don't-care-master". He does not care a hoot about what others think and say of him or his views. This has worked to his detriment. He also has attributes that serve him well. One of these is his formidable memory. He remembers not just in the style of a strong memory that can reel off lines from Shakespeare or Tagore or Faiz Ahmed Faiz, but as one who remembers with a context and recalls in active conjunction with real-life issues and real-death issues. India-Pakistan relations and nuclear disarmament are among such subjects. A little under a year ago, I wrote in these columns about his engaging book The Rajiv I Knew in which he has the following nugget about Prime Minister (PM) Rajiv Gandhi: 'He once told me, 'You know, Mani, if Pakistan does really have the bomb even I cannot stop India from going down the road to nuclear weapons'". Why "even I"? Because in the matter of nuclear weaponisation, Rajiv Gandhi was more his grandfather's than his mother's heir. He abhorred the idea of India hollowing its gut out to make weapons that can kill millions and maim millions more. Rajiv must have read Oppenheimer's celebrated quote from the Bhagavad Gita in which the great protagonist says, "I am become Death". Rajiv Gandhi did not want his government to become Death. He wanted it to restore life in the near-dead equations of the country with its neighbours. Mani Shankar Aiyar goes on to recall another conversation with Rajiv in which the then PM told him chillingly: "India and Pakistan already have the bomb." Mani was startled. How can that be? Continuing, Rajiv said to Mani, "The Canadians have gifted them to us. We have the Bhabha Atomic Centre reactor in Bombay, and the Pakistanis have the CANDU reactor in Karachi. All that it would take for a devastating nuclear explosion that would destroy both our commercial capitals would be for kamikaze pilots from either country to fly an aircraft straight into the reactor of the other." This was said by a PM who was a pilot before he became a politician. He knew the technology of what he was saying. Kamikaze pilots do not abound, and both countries have systems enough to spot any aircraft flying without permission into each other's airspace. But nevertheless, what Rajiv was visualising was not fiction. It was grimly real. And so, when on December 31, 1988, India's foreign secretary KPS Menon Jr. and Pakistan's foreign secretary Humayun Khan signed in the presence of PMs Rajiv Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto, an agreement on the prohibition of attack against nuclear installations and facilities, an answer was being found to Rajiv Gandhi's horrific visualisation of an apocalypse. Apart from and as part of the self-restraining of destruction or damage to nuclear installations or facilities, the agreement provided for an exchange on January 1 every year, a list of their nuclear installations and facilities. Given our relations, this was amazement. After Rajiv Gandhi, all subsequent PMs in India have respected and honoured the agreement - from VP Singh, Chandrashekhar, PV Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh, right up to and including our present PM, Narendra Modi. Another amazement. On January 1 this year - yes, this year too - the practice has been observed, and lists have been exchanged. This is the 35th consecutive exchange. The sanity of shared interests in survival has prevailed over the insanity of death choreographed by terrorism. This is even more than an amazement. We need to be thankful for this because of the guarantee it gives against the attacks in question. But we must know that attacks by non-State players using the same kamikaze method envisaged are even more likely. Getting access to our lists is not beyond the sly eyes and fanged fingers of those players. What can be done by both countries together to prevent that? This is the question that must bring both governments together again to confer on how terrorism is to be combated. Hard! We know that a set of ferocious terrorists targeting India does so from Pakistan's soil using the protection and patronage of different elements in Pakistan's establishment. If, despite that knowledge and despite India's emphatic response to Pulwama (February 2019) and then to Pahalgam (April 2025), and despite the scar left on Delhi itself by the fire ignited outside the Red Fort, the government of India has kept these two agreements active, it has to be because of two reasons. First, there are plinths in Pakistan's political architecture with which we can engage. Second, there are issues on which engaging with Pakistan is vital. I would not have even tried to be optimistic about this had another remarkable step, another remarkable exchange of another set of lists not been taken or happened. This is the exchange of lists of civilian prisoners and fishermen held in each other's countries under a 2008 agreement on consular access. India has earlier this month given to Pakistan the details of 391 civilian prisoners and 33 fishermen, who are or are believed to be Pakistani, against data on 58 civilians and 199 fishermen from India or believed to be from India, held in Pakistan. This is a humanitarian step of no ordinary value. This exchange of names must be followed up by a time-bound plan for the exchange of the prisoners themselves. Terrorism hurts and will continue to do so. It has to be met with unequivocal force. But alongside that use of force, there has to be use of a higher force, that of sanity, of humanity, to defeat the larger aim of terrorism, which is the deepening of fault lines, of hates and fears. This is hard, but the alternative is harder. Not just "Don't-care-master" Mani Shankar Aiyar, but everyone in India and Pakistan should welcome the January developments in India-Pakistan relations and congratulate the two governments on their maturity. One must hope that at some time sooner rather than later, the terror scene improves sufficiently to let India revisit the abeyance of the Indus Water Treaty mutatis mutandis. Pakistan must do all it can and show what it is doing so that the Indus waters can flow again as nature intends them to....