Pakistan is squarely responsible for
the collapse of the National Security Advisor level talks even before they
began. It chickened out late Saturday night because it knew that it would be
exposed on the issues of fomenting terror in India and protecting Dawood
Ibrahim, now reportedly in Karachi. That Islamabad did not want the talks to
happen is evident from the fact that it knowingly needled New Delhi by
insisting on interacting with the Hurriyat and raising the Kashmir matter. As
far back as a year ago, the Narendra Modi Government had made it clear that it
would not stand for any deliberation between the Hurriyat and the Pakistani
establishment on issues that are bilateral in nature, to be resolved only by
the Governments of the two countries. At that point in time, India had called
off the Foreign Secretary level talks because Pakistan went ahead with the
meeting with Hurriyat leaders despite New Delhi's advice to the contrary. This
time too, Islamabad insisted on repeating the provocation. The only difference
between then and now has been the Indian Government's response.
Rather than explicitly call off the
dialogue, it moved to detain the Hurriyat leaders who arrived in Delhi to
interact with the Pakistani guest and de facto National Security Advisor, Mr
Sartaj Aziz, thus torpedoing the chances of the meeting in the run-up to the
talks. Minister for External Affairs Sushma Swaraj made the Government's
position abundantly clear during her Press conference on Saturday and nailed Mr
Aziz's lie at a media briefing he addressed earlier the same day — that
Pakistan had followed the Ufa agreement in letter and spirit in its desire to
have the interaction between the two NSAs. The Pakistani representative had
claimed that the Ufa agreement had spoken of resolving ‘all outstanding issues
through talks'. The fact is that the NSA level talks had been specifically
agreed to as part of the Ufa deal to discuss only terror. Interactions on
various other matters such as Kashmir can and should take place at mutually convenient
dates, at various levels envisaged in what has come to be known as the
‘composite', and later the ‘resumed', dialogue. Terror was the only agenda at
this NSA meeting, which, it must be underlined, was not to be a ‘resumed'
dialogue where ‘all outstanding issues including Kashmir’ could be raised. The
talks between the NSAs could have paved the way for the ‘resumed’ dialogue. And
even in such a scenario, as Ms Swaraj pointed out, the letter and spirit of the
Simla agreement forbade the inclusion of a third party, including the
Hurriyat.
Now that Pakistan has called off the
NSA level talks, what happens to the dialogue process? It is important that the
two sides establish communication eventually, because on that rests the
establishment of peace in the region. India has, from all accounts, irrefutable
evidence in its dossiers on the role of Pakistani elements in spreading terror
in this country as well as on the Pakistani establishment’s patronage of the
most wanted man by India and Mumbai terror mastermind, Dawood Ibrahim. But the
onus of the resumption of talks is on Islamabad. It has to decide whether the
will of the elected Government headed by Mr Nawaz Sharif or the nefarious
designs of the Pakistan Army should prevail.
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