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It’s learnt that Pakistan came to the table with a “roadmap” leading to the resumption of composite dialogue which entailed an invitation for External Affairs Minister S M Krishna to visit Pakistan. But India was more keen on broadening the discussions at official levels and suggested a “technical meeting” to improve cross-LoC trade as a measure to show it was not skirting the Kashmir issue.
Pakistan Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir, sources said, conveyed that the three terror dossiers could have been handed over to the Pakistan High Commissioner and that his coming here should lead to a more substantive outcome. In this context, he extended the invitation for Krishna on behalf of the Pakistan Foreign Minister to visit Islamabad and suggested that Foreign Secretaries could meet a day before to finalise the agenda.
According to the Pakistan proposal, the meeting between the Foreign Ministers would lay the ground for discussions between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Pak counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani on the margins of the SAARC meet in Bhutan late April where the resumption of the composite dialogue could be announced through a joint statement.
But India was not in favour of this approach. Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao is said to have responded that it would be better for the FS-level dialogue to continue for the moment and, in that spirit, she was prepared to travel to Islamabad. The Pakistan side agreed reluctantly but has not yet followed it up with a formal invitation.
The Indian side had its own set of suggestions on official level talks. Besides proposing meetings on cross-LoC trade, India suggested holding a meeting between Commerce Secretaries to carry forward discussions on trade issues and a meeting of the Indo-Pak judicial committee for release of civilian prisoners and fishermen.
India also took note of a pending request from Pakistan to send a team of its Railway officials to study Indian plans for building a freight corridor and extended an invite for the same. Also, an invitation was renewed for the Pakistan Election Commissioner to visit India, a trip cancelled due to the IPL controversy.
But these proposals didn’t elicit a positive response from Pakistan which is more keen on “political-level,” meetings. In fact, sources said, Islamabad is not prepared yet to even move forward on back channel talks until a firm political direction is agreed upon.
New Delhi, on its part, feels that court proceedings against the 26/11-accused must reach some logical conclusion in the form of sentencing the guilty. Also, the Indian side is certain about the involvement of a serving Pakistani military official in the Mumbai attacks and wants that to be probed fully. “Credible” action on this front, sources said, are vital before India can proceed towards a comprehensive dialogue.
Due to such basic differences, gaps are widening with issues like Pakistan’s domestic problem of river-water sharing being spun as an Indo-Pak problem. At the forefront of this, are groups like the banned Jamaat-ud-Dawa which is only deepening suspicion in New Delhi over Islamabad’s larger intention.
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Whatever happened at FS level talks is unfortunate but not at all unexpected. Our approach appears to be totally devoid of strategy. all the foriegn policy experts , common citizens were totally against changing our stand that unless Pak demonstrates visible commitment to act against the terrorists we should not talk. But our learned PM choses to ignore all suggestions , and go ahead with change of track. Even at this stage I think it is good option to go back to the old stand. Also, PM should entrust policy making to some experts and go by their advice rather make silly mistakes like these which embarass the whole nation.
Actually based on our past experience and current experience as well, we should not proceed any further towards talk with pak. It is their policy they don't want to resolve this issue, they want to continuing this terror activities. It is their national policy (Clear from the current Hafiz Saeed's open meeting). So now we should upgrade our strength, financilly, economically and military wise. We should take terrorism as challenge and develop our nation accordingly. Israel is example of that. Inspite of whole world's threat they are living safely. why we can not keep our nation safe from the few mad men?
If cultural exchange programmes of Fine-Arts,Science etc are useful to break the communication gap.
India should be clear on, how to deal with Pakistan. Oneside we take initiative to start talk, then we say that we will talk about terror only. Then PM says that talk is only option. It confuses what our policy makers wanted to do. Just making hue-cry about cross border terrorism does appear helping us. If we have credible evidence of terrorist camp being operated from other country, we should attack on those sites and make our intention to isure safty of our land clear to the world. We must make it clear to the world, cost of challanging our safty.
Every time India extends hands it is bitten but it has become a habit and thus we continue to do so.Pakistan instead of thinking a friendship takes it as our weakness. We continue to make same mistakes as we have done for past 62 years. we were stupid to return territory and 93,000 POW without any thing in return and thus it has convinced Pakistani that they can send terrorist and we will just keep quite. We have muddied the 26/11 and thus such arrogance that such documents could had been handed to High commissioner shows how poorly we are thought about. It is this kind of Jingoism that no one in the world came to any help sofar. India must learn to become a mature nation instad of runing from pole to post