WASHINGTON: In American TV business, the term Full Ginsburg refers to an appearance by one person on all five major Sunday morning talk shows on the same day. It is named after William Ginsburg, the lawyer for Monica Lewinsky during the scandal involving President Bill Clinton, who was the first person to accomplish the feat in 1998. No such term has been coined for someone appearing before five think-tanks in Washington DC, but the “Full Jaishankar” may well become a benchmark for engaging the foreign policy brains’ trust in the United States.

Even accounting for appearances stretching across a week between other strenuous meetings and encounters, India’s new external affairs minister

’s blitz in Washington DC – a city someone said has more think tanks than some countries have battle tanks – constitutes the most intense interaction between New Delhi and Washington’s weighty foreign policy community since the exertions of his one-time boss and predecessor Jaswant Singh in the aftermath of the Shakti nuclear test. A former foreign secretary and ambassador to the US, Dr J, in a span of 72 hours, is jousting with five of Washington DC’s most prestigious talk shops: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Atlantic Council, Center for Strategic and International Studies, The Brookings Institution, and the Heritage Foundation, not to speak of engaging the US Congress. This, after having already engaged with the Center for Foreign Relations and Asia Society in New York on the sidelines of UN General Assembly.

That New Delhi wants to engage the world beyond Pakistan is no great secret, its vision broader and wider in scope than that of India- and Kashmir-obsessed Pakistan. Which is why despite the clamor about the Kashmir issue in the run-up to the UN meet and thereafter, Jaishankar listed meeting 42 foreign ministers, holding 36 bilateral meetings, eight pull asides, seven multilaterals/plurilaterals and three speaking engagements, in addition to supporting Prime Minister Modi’s own engagements with more than a dozen world leaders. More is happening in Washington DC currently, including meetings with US Secretary of State

, Defence Secretary Mark Esper, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, and Acting Homeland Secretary Kevin McAleenan.

But inasmuch as New Delhi’s engagement with the US and the global community is broad-based, with strategic ties with major nations and trade with all topping the agenda, the Kashmir issue has bubbled up in meetings, affording India an opportunity to explain its stand on a matter where Islamabad has mendaciously subverted the narrative, including that fact that the erstwhile state legally acceded to India and it is Pakistan which has illegally annexed what it calls “Azad Kashmir.” The UN resolutions that Islamabad keeps yammering about also calls on Pakistan to vacate the portion it has seized (no such direction to India) before any steps can be considered relating to plebiscite, a process which in any case is infructuous given the demographic and geographical changes in the region, including Pakistan ceding portions of the erstwhile state to China.

In a media briefing (separate ones for US and Indian journalists amid all other engagements), Jaishankar said the subject of Kashmir came up in at least half his meetings, with concern centering mostly on the civil liberties issue rather than New Delhi’s scrapping of Article 370. He explained to interlocutors that

was a temporary provision in India’s constitution from the get-go and it was always due to be removed, and the current security dragnet in the Valley was aimed primarily at preventing loss of life. “I like my internet but it not equal to (loss of) life,” Jaishankar said, referring to criticism about curtailment of communication.

India’s foreign policy czar was also dismissive of the idea that New Delhi’s move in Jammu and Kashmir had re-hyphenated India with Pakistan, telling a journalist, "You are really being very semantic about it. How do you hyphenate a country, which is one-eighth of your economic size ... which is reputationally your exact opposite?" By that

logic

India should not do anything which would bring Pakistan into the conversation at all, he added.

In the face of sporadic concern about the human rights situation from some US lawmakers, Jaishankar foresaw a “prudent return to normalcy” in Kashmir. He also waved off repeated offers of mediation on the issue saying there would be no change in India’s position of 40 years that it is a bilateral matter that brooked no third-party intervention.

The external affairs minister will attend a reception on Wednesday in the US Congress to commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi and the 90th birth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr. The event will also feature House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the top-ranking Democratic leader. Following apprehensions and criticism in some quarters about the Modi dispensation being seen as too close to the Trump establishment, New Delhi has been at pains to emphasize that its engagement with US is bipartisan and cuts across party lines.