No thaw ahead of Indo-Pak meet

A slew of protests ahead of the crucial meeting of the foreign secretaries, followed by the foreign ministers later this month, has signalled that the Manmohan Singh government has little interest in making a breakthrough in India-Pakistan ties.

Instead it has decided to lodge protests — to Pakistan protesting the building of a dam in the Northern Areas, to Islamabad giving a modicum of self rule to the the people living there, to protests over firing of rockets from Pakistan into Punjab.

Late Friday evening the government announced that  India protested through diplomatic channels  Pakistan’s so called ‘Gilgit-Baltistan Empowerment and Self Governance Order 2009’.

The order is yet another cosmetic exercise intended to camouflage Pakistan’s illegal occupation, India said in a statement. But these protests came only after Kashmiri separatist leader Yasin Mallik raised his voice against the order claiming that it was part of Kashmir.

“The government has got cold feet ever since the joint statement in Egypt and believes it is now not politically acceptable to do anything constructive with Pakistan,’’ says former foreign secretary Salman Haider.