Prime minister Manmohan Singh is expected to meet Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari next week in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
Prime minister Manmohan Singh is expected to meet Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari next week in Yekaterinburg, Russia, where both will attend the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit.
The meeting is billed as an icebreaker that could pave the way for a resumption of the stalled Indo-Pak composite dialogue sometime later this year. The government is still mulling over the format of the meeting but it will probably be a brief, unstructured one. This would give both leaders enough flexibility to send messages that would satisfy their domestic audiences as well as the United States, which has made no secret of its desire to get India and Pakistan talking again.
In fact, visiting US under-secretary of state William Burns has been pushing the dialogue point in all his meetings in New Delhi and he would probably have mentioned it in some form or the other when he met the PM on Thursday to hand over a letter from US president Barack Obama.
A PMO aide refused to disclose the contents of the letter except to say that it reiterated the importance of the Indo-US bilateral relationship and contained an invitation to Singh to visit Washington at the earliest opportunity.
While the pressure to talk is evident, the US has learnt to choose its words carefully after many bitter experiences with India’s brittle sensibilities, especially on Pakistan. Burns said it was up to India and Pakistan to decide the “place, scope and character” of their dialogue.
It did not need US nudging to remind the government of the need to start talking to Pakistan again. It was always one of the priority items on the agenda for the new government. The dialogue process was merely “paused” after the Mumbai terror attacks last year because of the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.
However, what India is looking for is a face-saver to justify rebooting the talks and, presumably, a track II effort is on with Pakistan to find it. A seasoned diplomat suggested that a fresh effort by the Zardari government to book one of the suspected masterminds of 26/11, Hafiz Sayeed, would be good optics. Expectations are high in New Delhi that it may materialise soon, maybe even before Singh and Zardari meet in Russia.
India and Pakistan have observer status at SCO, which is a security and economic grouping of central Asian countries and is led by Russia and China.
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