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Journalism of Courage
India and Pakistan may just be inching back on the long road to reconciliation, with both sides today sounding surprisingly upbeat about the day-long review of the first full composite dialogue round between Foreign Secretaries Shyam Saran and Riaz Khokhar.
This despite the fact that both sides couldn’t reach agreement on even the kind of talks they needed to have on the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus.
New Delhi wanted ‘‘technical-level talks’’ first while the Pakistani side proposed local permits for passengers in ‘‘political-technical talks’.
Even the cold shower thrown by Pak Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri on the eve of his departure for Delhi could not dampen the spirits of the two bureaucracies.
This issue and others like Siachen and Sir Creek, which were also stalemated as both sides kept to their own positions, will now be taken up over the next couple of days.
Perhaps the fact of a meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Musharraf on the margins of the UNGA in New York later this month had something to do with today’s buoyant mood.
On the eve of his departure for New Delhi this afternoon, Kasuri in a four-page statement said it was ‘‘regrettable’’ that both sides had been unable to resolve the Kashmir dispute that had led to a state of ‘‘tension and flux.’’
Kasuri’s statement provoked the Foreign Office to issue its own rejoinder, describing it as not being ‘‘in consonance with the spirit in which we’ve conducted the composite dialogue so far,’’ which, the spokesman added, ‘‘also violates Pakistan’s own call for a rhetorical restraint regime.’’
Still, the insistently positive mood on both sides was the real giveaway. Considering Kashmiris on both sides are immensely keen on starting the bus across the LoC, the two foreign ministers may yet thrash out a compromise on this issue.
The Pakistani side is said to have asked New Delhi for dates to have political-technical talks, but the Indian side seems determined not to allow any pre-1953-type permit to dampen their position. A compromise on some kind of ‘‘technical-level talks’’ may yet surprise everybody. Pakistani spokesman Masood Khan confirmed that the idea was discussed when Singh travelled to Islamabad in July and that the two ministers could give ‘‘directions for technical-level talks.’’
Pakistan also accepted the Indian idea of a set of technical-level discussions on military CBMs to take this story forward.
Kasuri will meet Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Shabir Shah the day after. A proposal by Shah for a joint meeting of the Hurriyat with Kasuri was shot down by the Pakistani side which, it is learnt, wanted Geelani to meet Kasuri separately.
