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."