India is not going to discuss substantive issues like Kashmir with Pakistan in the proposed rounds of dialogue but is only attempting to create the “right atmosphere” for removing the trust deficit for a broad dialogue later.
“We are not going to discuss substantive issues like Kashmir. As of now, our effort is to create a right atmosphere. Only then some degree of trust can be created between the two countries,” highly-placed sources in the government said.
They said the effort is for eliminating the trust deficit and “we are not talking to Pakistan on four issues that concern us”. There was no alternative but to talk to Pakistan as war was not an option, they said.
The government’s stand was made clear in response to a question at a journalistic interaction whether the government’s current moves to resume dialogue with Pakistan would be picking up of threads from where the Musharraf regime left or would it be a fresh de novo effort from the beginning.
This was in the context of former Pakistani foreign minister Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri’s recent claim that India and Pakistan were close to signing an agreement on some crucial issues.
Former President Pervez Musharraf had mooted four areas on which the Pakistani claimed the two countries had come close to an agreement. The areas included demilitarisation of Kashmir on both sides and the Siachen glacier and some kind of autonomy to these areas. Recently in Bhutan, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Yousaf Raza Gilani decided on resuming dialogue between the two countries. External affairs minister S.M. Krishna will be visiting Pakistan in the middle of July.
The sources said a lot of things have changed since the Sharm-el-Sheikh controversy and in the context of Prime Minister’s deep desire for engagement between India and Pakistan. The Indian government sees a change in Pakistan’s attitude and its tone and tenor has also changed. —PTI