Natwar brings back river talks to push Indo-Pak talks forward

With Natwar Singh keen to mend his purportedly misreported fences with Islamabad, the unscheduled meeting on the Baglihar dam takes on interesting colour.

The last ‘‘technical meeting’’ between the two Indus water commissioners in January ended in a stalemate with New Delhi pulling back from the brink and allowing the Pakistan team to visit the site in Kashmir.

Islamabad had then argued that the design of India’s upriver dam violated the 1960 treaty brokered by the World Bank. Things had become so ugly—this was before the pathbreaking summit between Vajpayee and Musharraf in January—that Islamabad threatened to take the matter to a neutral observer. New Delhi walked back from the brink by allowing the Kashmir site visit.

Singh’s desire to get a move on with the relationship with Pakistan was also reflected in his unscheduled lunch today with Pakistan High Commissioner to India Aziz Khan after he presided over the launch of a book on the recent Indo-Pak cricket series.

This is the second time in less than a week that Singh has met the Pakistan High Commissioner. Last week when Aziz Khan went to call on Foreign Secretary Shashank, Singh called him in when he discovered he was in the building. That’s when he phoned Pakistan foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri to stress that things were just fine between the two sides and that New Delhi was determined to take things forward with Islamabad.

Interestingly, Singh will be meeting Kasuri in Beijing on the margins of the Asian Cooperation Dialogue on June 21-22, just as the nuclear CBM talks between senior officials in the capital would have concluded.

July is likely to be an even busier month for the bilateral relationship, with the six issues in the Composite Dialogue likely to be separately taken up by secretary-level officers in different capitals. This is in marked contrast to the last composite dialogue meeting in October 1998, when the six meetings were simultaneously held in New Delhi.

Under the circumstances, the meetings on the Siachen glacier between the Defence secretaries, Sir Creek/Tulbul barrage between the Water secretaries and economic and commercial matters between the Commerce secretaries are likely to be especially interesting. In the last, the Iran-India gas pipeline via Pakistan, will likely be taken up.