Pakistan sends a feeler

Pakistan is believed to have informally told India that it would considerably ease the reopening of the Karachi consulate if New Delhi was w...

Pakistan is believed to have informally told India that it would considerably ease the reopening of the Karachi consulate if New Delhi was willing to lease Jinnah House in Mumbai to Pakistan. This is believed to have been raised when Principal Secretary Brajesh Mishra met his counterpart, secretary of the Pakistani National Security Council Tariq Aziz, in Lahore some ten days ago.

But Indian officials, who have been resisting even acknowledging that Mishra met Aziz in Lahore, today insisted ‘‘there was no such conversation.’’ They only pointed out that the property now belonged to the Indian Council of Cultural Relations—an autonomous body managed by the MEA—and would soon be made into a SAARC cultural centre.

The issue has in fact been simmering for the last few months ever since the January summit-level meetings, when it came up between Foreign Secretary Shashank and his counterpart Riaz Khokhar.

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Soon after in February, India’s high commissioner to Pakistan Shiv Shanker Menon travelled to Karachi to take a look at the five pieces of consulate property and found it in pretty bad shape. Photographs of the same were also sent to New Delhi.

It now transpires that Pakistan would like a quid pro quo : India should lease the house that Jinnah lived in on Malabar Hill in Bombay prior to Partition. In return, Islamabad would be happy to grant India access to reopening the Karachi consulate that was shut down after rioters went through it in 1994.

Pakistani sources said it would ‘‘be a wonderful confidence-building measure’’ if India agreed to lease the Jinnah property as a residence of Pakistan’s consul-general.

Meanwhile, even as the election season hots up at home, India and Pakistan are resuming other elements of their dialogue with the first-ever round of talks on a bus service that will breach the Line of Control from Srinagar to Muzaffarabad on April 8-9 in Islamabad.

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Pakistan has also proposed May 25-26 as dates for expert-level talks on nuclear confidence-building measures, that could also incorporate discussions on ‘‘strategic restraint’’ as well as cooperation on nuclear issues in international fora.

The nuclear CBM talks will essentially be a reiteration of the Lahore 1999 MOU on the subject, sources here said.

India and Pakistan are also resuming other elements of their dialogue with the first-ever round of talks on a bus service that will breach the Line of Control from Srinagar to Muzaffarabad on April 8-9 in Islamabad.

Joint secretary in the ministry of surface transport Alok Rawat will lead the Indian delegation to the cross-LoC bus talks in Islamabad. The delegation is likely to focus on infrastructural issues such as customs and immigration points as well as the rebuilding of roads and bridges from the major cities that link their respective parts of Kashmir to the LoC.