Skepticism around Indo-Pakistan ties
Skepticism around Indo-Pakistan ties
By Raja Asghar
ISLAMABAD (Reuters): The election of a new government in India
will do little to break the deadlock in Indo-Pakistan peace
talks, analysts said in Pakistan.
Prime Ministers Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan and Atal Behari
Vajpayee of India have vowed to go the "extra mile" to improve
ties between the two countries, which have fought three wars in
the 50 years since they gained independence.
But political analysts and commentators were skeptical of
either side making any substantial concessions, particularly in
their long-standing dispute over the Himalayan region of Kashmir,
the cause of two of the three wars.
"It doesn't matter what government is there in India, they
have a national policy about Pakistan," Farooq Leghari, who
resigned as president last December, told Reuters. "And the same
is the case in Pakistan (about India)."
Sharif was conciliatory last Friday, telling Vajpayee in a
message of greetings that Islamabad was "ready to go the extra
mile in journeying towards cooperative and good neighborly
relations with India".
Sharif invited Vajpayee to resume the peace talks, which
stalled in September over differences on making Kashmir one of
eight agreed agenda items.
Vajpayee, in a television broadcast on Sunday, replied:
"Whenever there is the slightest opportunity to improve our
relations with Islamabad, my government will go the extra mile".
Pakistan regards a settlement in Kashmir, of which it controls
one-third, as key to any normalization of ties with India, which
rules the remaining two-thirds and claims the whole of the once
princely state.
"I don't think there can be an early resumption of the peace
talks unless Pakistan were to give up insistence on carrying all
eight agenda items simultaneously," said Ghani Jafar, an analyst
at Islamabad's Institute of Regional Studies.
Pakistan has made a resumption of the talks conditional on
substantive talks on Kashmir.
The talks stalled in September when a meeting between the
foreign secretaries of the two countries in New Delhi failed to
agree on whether Kashmir would be part of a separate working
group or part of a wide-ranging dialogue.
Pakistan accuses India of reneging on a June 1997 agreement on
an eight-point agenda for talks and wants Kashmir to be addressed
by a separate working group. India wants it kept at the foreign
secretary level and not treated as a specific dispute.
"How the bilateral process can be put back on the rails again
with a more prickly government in Delhi will be a challenging
test of Pakistani diplomacy in coming months," The News daily
said in an editorial comment.
To be meaningful the talks "should deal with all matters
substantively, steering clear of the bureaucratic procrastination
and hair-splitting which brought the negotiations at the foreign
secretaries level to impasse", the Pakistani daily Dawn said.
During the election campaign, Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata
Party threatened to seize the part of Kashmir Islamabad rules,
leading Pakistani Foreign Minister Gohar Ayub Khan to declare
there would be "a swift and telling reply" to any such
"misadventure".
Pakistan and the new Indian government also disagree over
their nuclear policies. Vajpayee's coalition has pledged to keep
New Delhi's nuclear options open and Islamabad has said it could
do the same.
Analyst Jafar said the BJP's declarations could have been
electoral rhetoric and the government's coalition partners might
force the BJP to soften its line.
"We will have to wait and see," he said. "It is not quite
correct to view India's nuclear program in only the India-
Pakistan context. There are other global players and India too
would have to contend with them."