The collapse of talks Monday, 24 August 2015 | Pioneer |

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.