New Delhi
10 February 2011
India will resume structured peace talks with Pakistan, two years and two
months after they were suspended following the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.
In a concession to Islamabad, all issues, including, but not limited to, Jammu and
Kashmir, will be discussed, but without the label of composite dialogue.
As per the decision announced simultaneously in New Delhi and Islamabad, official-level
talks on nine subjects will be scheduled over the next few months.
They are: counter-terrorism (including progress on the trial of the terrorists who carried
out the Mumbai attacks); humanitarian issues; peace and security, including confidence-
building measures; Jammu and Kashmir; promotion of friendly exchanges; Siachen;
economic issues; Wullar barrage / Tulbul navigation project; and Sir Creek (at the level
of additional secretaries / surveyors-general).
It will be topped by the meetings between the two foreign secretaries and foreign
ministers, which can be expected to be held in New Delhi by July.
India had been maintaining that the talks could not resume until Pakistan gave it
satisfaction on the issue of terrorism in general and the Mumbai attacks in particular.
However, Pakistan stuck to a all-or-nothing approach, insisting that the talks should
focus on all outstanding issues, including Jammu and Kashmir.
The structure of the proposed talks resembles the composite dialogue to the extent that
it has all the eight subjects of the past, except that the items have been unbundled. The
new addition, the ninth, is "humanitarian issues". Also, instead of discussing "terrorism
and drug trafficking" both sides now will focus on counter-terrorism, including progress
on the Mumbai attacks case.
Today's decision signals a reversion to the Sharm-el-Sheikh joint statement, in which
prime ministers Manmohan Singh and Yusuf Raza Gilani agreed that "action on
terrorism should not be linked to the composite dialogue process and these should not
be bracketed."
In Islamabad, Prime Minister Gilani welcomed the announcement, saying that it marks
the culmination of the efforts made by him and Prime Minister Singh over the last
several months, most recently at Thimphu in April 2010 on the margins of the Saarc
summit.
Prime Minister Singh's office did not put out any statement, but foreign secretary
Nirupama Rao, who met with her Pakistan counterpart in Thimphu a few days ago,
described the decision to restart "serious, sustained and comprehensive" talks as "very
pragmatic".
India and Pakistan have concluded four rounds of the composite dialogue. The first
round of the composite dialogue was held in October and November 1998. The fifth round
of the dialogue process was suspended after the Mumbai attacks. The dialogue was
disrupted on many occasions, most notably after the attack on the Indian Parliament in
2001. It resumed only in January 2004. The July 2006 train blasts in Mumbai affected the
bilateral ties, too, but the talks were restarted after Prime Minister Singh and the then
Pakistani president Gen Pervez Musharraf (Retd) met on the sidelines of the Non-Aligned
Movement (NAM) summit in September 2006.
The dialogue made incremental progress over the years but the last round was seen as
being the most productive. Prime Minister Singh said on the eve of the 2009
parliamentary elections that he was close to clinching an agreement with Musharraf but
the 2007 lawyers' protests led to Musharraf's downfall, who stepped down in 2008.
In January this year, Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, a former foreign minister of Pakistan,
echoed similar sentiments. He said in New Delhi that by late 2006 India and Pakistan
had come close to an agreed draft on the contours of a settlement on Kashmir, Siachen
and Sir Creek. He said India would do well to seize the consensus that exists in military
and political circles in Pakistan that peace must be given another chance. He also noted
that Prime Minister Singh must consider visiting Pakistan so that the progress made in
backchannel negotiations is not frittered away.
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