INDIA HAS offered to hold official-level talks with nuclear rival Pakistan, restarting the bilateral dialogue suspended after the November 2008 terrorist strike on Mumbai which New Delhi blamed on Islamabad.
However, no date for talks between the respective foreign secretaries has been confirmed.
The visit of India’s interior minister P Chidambaram to Pakistan for a regional security meeting later this month, when he meets Pakistani counterpart Rehman Malik, is likely to set the future agenda for more substantive talks, senior officials in Delhi indicated.
“There are now signals emanating from India that they are willing to talk bilaterally,” Pakistan’s foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said in Islamabad.
“We welcome this, if it leads to resumption of the composite dialogue,” he added, referring to the last round of talks in May 2008 between the neighbours who have fought three wars since independence in 1947, and an 11-week-long border skirmish in 1999.
The inconclusive “composite dialogue” launched in 2004 focused on contentious issues that included the disputed Kashmir province which is divided between the two sides but claimed by both. These are: unresolved maritime boundaries, cross-border terrorism, narcotics smuggling, nuclear and conventional military confidence building measures, economic co-operation and enhancing people-to-people contacts.
Disputed frontiers in the marshy Sir Creek region alongside the Arabian Sea and the 21-year-old military face-off along the 6,400 metres high (21,000 ft) northern Siachen glacier were also part of the dialogue that made incremental progress before being terminated after the attack on Mumbai in which 166 people died.
India blamed the strike on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-i-Toiba (LiT or Army of the pure) militant group based near the eastern border city of Lahore.
Islamabad has concurred and is prosecuting a handful of LiT operatives for involvement in planning the Mumbai attack.
Meanwhile, Indian television news channels, quoting government sources, said Delhi would go into the talks with “an open mind” and discuss “all issues on the table without judging the outcome of the discussions”.
Senior Indian diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that in all likelihood the dialogue would initially be “talk about talks”, their outcome determining the future course of dialogue.
They do not rule out US pressure on senior Indian leaders to resume talks with Islamabad as Washington fleshes out its plans to expand talks with moderate Taliban leaders in Afghanistan as a prelude to militarily withdrawing from the region from mid-2011 onwards.
The US is also seeking India’s help bolstering the credibility of Pakistan’s civilian administration and facing down the country’s military omnipotent Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID), both of which have been in charge of affairs for decades, directly or indirectly. Diminishing returns from India’s strategy of “coercive diplomacy” in refusing talks with Pakistan were becoming glaringly apparent as global sympathy for the Mumbai attacks waned and Delhi was increasingly looked upon as being intransigent and obdurate.
“The spectre of an aggressive, non-compliant India on Pakistan’s eastern border has long provided its army with an alibi for not acting against Islamist forces embedded along its western frontier with Afghanistan” security analyst Seema Mustafa said.
Securing peace between the neighbours would significantly alter the situation for the US and Nato by ensuring the Pakistani army’s robust involvement in combating al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies in this restive region as a prelude to the eventual withdrawal of western forces, she added.