Foreign secretary Nirupama Rao, who will travel to Islamabad next week, urged Pakistan to learn to live with the asymmetries in sizes and capabilities between the neighbours.
Ahead of next week's talks with Pakistan to reduce the "trust deficit", India has advocated "creative solutions" on Jammu & Kashmir and other issues to build on the progress made earlier through the composite dialogue and back-channel diplomacy.
Outlining India's approach to future engagement with Pakistan, foreign secretary Nirupama Rao, who will travel to Islamabad for talks with her counterpart, Salman Bashir, on June 25, listed the progress made on Jammu & Kashmir "based on the common understanding that boundaries could not be redrawn" but should be made irrelevant.
Rao said the two countries had also agreed that people on both sides of the Line of Control (LoC) should be able to move freely and trade with one another.
She mentioned cross-LoC confidence-building measures that had been put in place, including the bus service between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad.
"On the way forward, we have to build on these achievements," she said during a speech at the Afghanistan-India-Pakistan 'trialogue' held by the Delhi Policy Group yesterday.. "We also have to reaffirm the progress made through complex negotiations and dialogue through patient and unsung effort, whether in the composite dialogue or back-channel diplomacy, during this period. We must seek creative solutions."
She also asked Pakistan to "shed its insecurity" on asymmetries in sizes and capabilities between the two countries, including the strategic leverage gained after the Indo-US nuclear deal, as they were not targeted against it.
Emphasising that as the two countries begin the exercise of overcoming the difficulties in their relationship, it was important to reiterate a few points, Rao said it included "learning to live with the asymmetries in our sizes and capabilities.
"Such differences of scale should not deter us from working with each other. Pakistan should shed its insecurity on these counts."
Despite "misguided and serious provocation", India has exhibited true restraint, Rao said.
She asked Pakistan to prevent the entry of radical ideology into the domain of religion, and the consequent implications for peace and security between India and Pakistan, making differences over Kashmir even more difficult.
Radical, terrorist forces are also increasingly battling for larger space in a deadly struggle that seeks to overwhelm moderate, democratic forces in Pakistani civil society, Rao said.
"The writing on the wall must be seen," she said.
On India's role in Afghanistan, Rao said the country neither sees Afghanistan as a battleground for competing national interests
nor assistance to Afghan reconstruction and development as a
zero-sum game.
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