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Journalism of Courage
The broad smiles on the part of both India and Pakistan only told part of the story today, masking the painfully slow progress that will be reflected in a joint statement at the end of the two-day Foreign Ministerial talks here tomorrow.
K Natwar Singh and his counterpart Khurshid Kasuri met this morning for a whole hour without aides, after which the two delegations worked all day to hammer out modalities for another round of talks on the cross-LoC bus from Srinagar to Muzaffarabad.
The Singh-Kasuri meeting, with an eye to the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh-President Musharraf encounter in New York in three weeks time, gave both sides the political direction needed to break the deadlock on the terminology for the cross-LoC bus talks, that had so far kept both sides apart.
India, for example, wanted ‘‘technical-level talks’’ first, while Pakistan wanted ‘‘politico-technical level talks.’’ Whatever the discussions are now called, an ‘‘expert group’’ or something else, the fact remains that they will be taking place.
The breakthrough came with both ministers deciding that they ‘‘definitely’’ wanted the bus to roll across the Line of Control. The rest, the sources said, was up to the officials to decide whether passenger documentation would be a ‘‘special passport’’ for India-Pakistan or some other piece of paper that would be valid for all Indian/Pakistani citizens in their respective countries.
Still, this Foreign Ministerial round seems to have been given over to imbuing the small parts with considerable glamour, such as the decision to hold technical-level talks on a railway line from Munabao to Khokhrapar across the international boundary in Rajasthan (as requested by the Pakistani side), between the two coast guards, between the BSF and the Pakistan Rangers and on nuclear confidence-building measures.
A bagful of small steps are also on the cards, such as additional facilitation for pilgrimages, the upkeep of historical sites (Pakistan evidently wants supplies from India to give a facelift to Jahangir’s tomb) as well as allowing newly inducted Foreign Service diplomats to travel to the other country so as to enable them to broaden their horizons.
Foreign Office spokesperson Navtej Sarna was determinedly optimistic. ‘‘The talks,’’ he said, ‘‘are being held in a friendly, cordial, affable and constructive atmosphere.’’
His usage of the quadruple adjective however did not mask the fact that both sides had stayed as far apart on the so-called ‘‘Kashmir’’ question as they were before the talks. Both stuck to their traditional positions: India said all of Kashmir is an integral part of India, Pakistan said let’s invoke the UN resolutions. Both agreed that progress needed to be made.
They also agreed that they needed another round to discuss the Siachen, Sir Creek and Wular barrage issues. On Siachen, the question of disengagement and redeployment was gone over again, but it doesn’t seem to have yielded much result.
Clearly, the Indian side seems to have stuck to its strategy, that is smiling sweetly but not appearing to be fazed by the recurring Pakistani rhetoric on the need to ‘‘involve Kashmiris’’, to have a ‘‘just and lasting settlement of the Kashmir dispute’’, etc.
Instead of getting involved in an unnecessary war of words, New Delhi focussed on progress on the ground. They pointedly told the Pakistanis that infiltration had been steadily up since June 10 and remained a cause for worry.
The Pakistani response was that they stood by the January 6 statement signed by General Musharraf and former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, in which the Pak president had promised that no territory of Pakistan would be allowed to host terrorists and that dialogue would be free of violence and hostility. They implied that they were as much a victim of the same terrorism.
