Thaindian News

New Delhi, Sep 28 (IANS) With the meeting of Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers in New York ending in a stalemate, the next opportunity for the two countries to make another effort to start their stalled dialogue is in Port of Spain, Trinidad, on the sidelines of the Commonwealth summit November-end.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will be participating in the Commonwealth Heads of Government (CHOGM) meeting in Port of Spain, set for Nov 27-29. It’s not clear who will represent Pakistan at the summit, but it could be either President Asif Ali Zardari or Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, sources in Pakistan’s high commission said here.

The two leaders are likely to meet, though no dates have been set, the sources said.

This will be the first meeting between the top leaders of India and Pakistan after Manmohan Singh met Gilani at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt July 16 and agreed to a contentious formulation that sought to give Islamabad some space to crack down on anti-India militants by delinking terrorism from the composite dialogue process. But there was little action by the Pakistani side in the next three months.

Not surprisingly, the meeting between External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna and his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi on the sidelines of the UNGA in New York Sunday failed to thaw the freeze in dialogue, which was suspended after the Mumbai attacks last year.

Pakistan predictably made a renewed pitch for restarting the dialogue and India asked for more concrete action against terrorists.

“We told Pakistan that India still has serious concerns about terror groups there and underlined the need for concrete and effective steps against these entities,” Krishna said in New York after a 100-minute meeting with Qureshi.

New Delhi has repeatedly expressed its unhappiness with the lack of adequate action by Islamabad to punish the perpetrators of the Mumbai carnage, specially against Hafeez Saaed, whom New Delhi regards as the chief architect of the 26/11 mayhem in which 170 people were killed and hundreds injured.

“It was predictable. What outcome do you expect when there is virtually no action by Pakistan against the Mumbai terrorists and the larger infrastructure of terrorism?,” G. Parthasarathy, a former Indian envoy to Pakistan, told IANS.

“If Pakistan does not satisfy India with its action on terrorism, how can it be business-as-usual?” said Satish Chandra, a former deputy national security adviser.

Ahead of the talks between the two foreign ministers, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made it clear that Pakistan must give up “its old attitude of using terror as an instrument of state policy” if it wants meaningful dialogue with India.

This was the message Krishna reinforced, telling Qureshi only “concrete and effective steps” against the anti-India terror infrastructure can convince it about the sincerity of Pakistan.

The hardening of India’s stand was also evident in its polite ‘No’ to Pakistan’s proposal for back-channel talks.

The ball is now in Pakistan’s court.

Pakistan has two more months to prove its anti-terror pledge and punish the Mumbai attackers before the leaders of the two countries meet in Port of Spain.