Will Manmohan, Zardari smoke the peace pipe?

After months of sabre-rattling, India and Pakistan are beginning to show signs of picking up the threads of the stalled peace process.

Prime minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistan president Asif Ali Zardari are expected to meet at the Shanghai cooperation organisation summit in Yekaterinburg, Russia, next week.

Singh and Zardari will meet for the first time since the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last year. “Well, they will be in the same room, same place, same time. I am sure they will be meeting but what sort of meeting it will be is difficult to say at this stage,” foreign secretary Shiv Shankar Menon told reporters on Friday. “Sure they will meet and shake hands,” he said again.

He pointed out that with two major meetings squeezed in on June 16 (the SCO in the morning and the Brazil, Russia, India, China summit the same afternoon), there was little time. Menon reiterated that India was ready to resume peace talks with Pakistan, provided Islamabad was willing to cooperate in the Mumbai attacks investigation.

Asked if the rules of resumption of dialogue with Pakistan had changed, Menon said, “Nothing can be more authoritative than what the PM himself said in Parliament.” Singh had said while India wishes to resume talks with Pakistan, “it needs two hands to clap”.
Sources said even if there were no formal talks, Zardari would come out with a clear message that his government was willing to take care of India’s concerns. “He is likely to assure India that the judicial process will be accelerated to ensure that those responsible for the Mumbai attacks will be behind bars,” a senior official said.

When asked about the meeting, Abdul Basid, spokesperson of the Pakistan foreign office, said, “It will not be a formal meeting, but they may meet informally.”
Significantly, Pakistan has indicated that it is considering an appeal against a Lahore court’s decision to release Hafiz Saeed, who plotted the Mumbai attacks.

Referring to India’s longstanding demand that Pakistan bring to book the perpetrators of the Mumbai terrorist strike, Basid said:

“We are sparing no effort to punish the perpetrators of the crime,” he said.
Basid also welcomed PM Singh’s statement in parliament in which he said talks between the two countries were important and necessary to face the issues the two countries were facing.

Support for the resumption of the peace process has also come from the likes of former foreign minister of Pakistan Khursheed Kasuri and retired general Talat Masood. Kasuri was a key figure in the dialogue between the two countries when Pervez Musharraf was in charge. “A lot of work had been done. We were close to resolving Sir Creek, Siachen and even the Kashmir issue,” Kasuri said.

He said all that remained for Singh was to travel to Pakistan and sign the deal.