Says India wants to resolve all issues through dialogue; India blames ISI for Mumbai attacks
By Mariana Baabar
ISLAMABAD: India’s External Affairs Minister, S M Krishna, arrived in Islamabad on Wednesday afternoon on a three-day visit with a “message of peace and friendship from the people of India”.
Received at the airport by Pakistan’s High Commissioner to India, Shahid Malik and DG South Asia, Krishna is accompanied by Foreign Secretary Nerupama Rao, senior officials and a 35-member team of journalists.
Pakistan and India, hoping to build on the “trust and confidence” reflected at the Saarc summit in Thimpu, held the foreign secretary-level talks last month but it is to be seen how a timely damper by India’s Home Secretary G K Pillai, blaming the ISI for controlling and coordinating the Mumbai attacks, will play up at the Foreign Office on Thursday morning.
“Pakistan finds these remarks disturbing”, said one official adding that it was taken up at the informal dinner on Wednesday night. The dinner, which wrapped up well after 10 pm, as one official said “was very informal. They (the two foreign ministers) chated about mangoes, films, cars, football and Psychic Octopus.”
Krishna told the media on his arrival that both sides will discuss all issues of mutual interest and concern that can contribute to restoring trust and bringing confidence in their bilateral relationship.
While telling PTI “India has long been a victim of terrorism emanating from Pakistan,” he also told the media, “I am carrying with me a message of peace and friendship from the people of India and we hope to undertake this voyage of peace, however long and arduous, jointly with the Government and people of Pakistan”.
The Indian external affairs minister expressed the hope that his present visit to Pakistan will bring about a positive outcome, saying “India wants to resolve all issues with Pakistan through a process of dialogue.” Krishna added that his country wishes to see Pakistan as a peaceful and prosperous nation.
Krishna’s first unofficial meeting with his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi was a dinner at a five-start hotel where the Indian delegation is staying. Meanwhile, last minute meetings were held at the Foreign Office on Wednesday, including one in which Pakistan was finalising its response to India’s request to include water issues in the segment of the Wullar Barrage, which was a part of the Composite Dialogue.
“We have been conveyed this through diplomatic channels. India feels that we already have the mechanism of the Indus Water Treaty, which is functioning. They wanted water issues to be included in the segment of the Wullar Barrage. Pakistan has not agreed but neither have we said no, as we are studying its implications and formulating a reply. Work on the Wullar Barrage has stopped”, an official told The News.
Another issue that the Foreign Office was seized with was requests from the South Block, which was indeed working for “blocking” a lengthy media interaction at the joint press conference after a formal lunch between the two foreign ministers and their delegations. It had succeeded during the foreign secretary-level talks when Pakistan agreed to only ‘four’ questions being permitted. The bureaucracy was in a “protectionist” mood as far as their minister, a veteran politician, was concerned.
With the presence of nearly a hundred local and foreign media persons, the Foreign Office was feeling the heat from the journalist community who wanted an extended interaction. Another pressure that the government here faces is those voices, which are growing impatient with New Delhi’s focus on the “trust deficit”, adding that this was a misguided notion.
“Why does not the Foreign Office clearly come out and say that this is not something new, and certainly not an outcome of the Mumbai attacks? Ever since Partition, both countries have suffered from ‘trust deficits’. After all we have gone to war with each other three times and there have been more downs than ups in our bilateral relationship so trust deficit is to be expected. We hope Krishna comes up with something more original this time”, is one view.
As far as hate speeches are concerned, with New Delhi’s obsession with Hafiz Saeed’s speeches, former Foreign Secretary Riaz Khokhar says that even he can be accused of this. “These kind of speeches are heard in both countries, so it is unfair to just point fingers at Pakistan,” he says.
Krishana meanwhile, starts the day today, with an early morning meeting with Qureshi and later another meeting with the delegations of the two sides. This will be followed by a luncheon hosted by Qureshi and then a joint press conference.
Later, Krishna will call upon the prime minister and the president. In the evening, he will be the chief guest at a reception to be hosted by the Indian High Commission. Friday morning will see Krishna meet with senior politicians from the ANP, PML-N and the MQM, before leaving for home.
Agencies add: Foreign Office spokesman Abdul Basit said on Wednesday that the talks between Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and his Indian counterpart SM Krishna will bring positive results.
Talking to a private TV channel, he said “there is no fixed agenda for the meeting but all issues, including Kashmir, water and terrorism, would be discussed by the two foreign ministers.”
He said that Kashmir was the core issue between the two countries, which should be resolved. He hoped that the meeting would bring about positive results and pave the way for a constructed dialogue.
To a question about US sanctions against Iran, the spokesman said it would not affect the Pak-Iran gas pipeline project. He also expressed the hope that the project would be completed in 2014 and it would help in meeting energy crisis, which is being faced by the country.
To a question about the Pak-China civil nuclear programme, he said the reservation of any country on the matter was baseless.He said nuclear programme had become necessary to promote economic growth in the country.
Meanwhile, a top Indian security official said Pakistan’s intelligence agency controlled and coordinated the 2008 Mumbai attacks.Home Secretary GK Pillai’s comments to an Indian newspaper published on Wednesday come a day before the foreign ministers of the nuclear-armed rivals meet in Islamabad to repair relations worsened by the attacks.
India last year linked Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) with the attacks, saying the perpetrators were clients and creations of the agency. But Pillai’s remarks are more direct and could find resonance in the foreign ministers’ meeting. “It was not just a peripheral role,” the Indian Express newspaper quoted Pillai as saying. “They (ISI) were literally controlling and coordinating it from the beginning till the end.”
Pillai was not immediately available for comment.India has blamed Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militants for the Mumbai attacks. It broke off a 4-year-old peace process with Pakistan, saying reviving the dialogue would depend on action against LeT and its chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed.
Pillai said the evidence against the ISI emerged from the interrogation by Indian officials of a Chicago man, David Headley, who pleaded guilty to working with LeT to plan the attacks. “The sense that has come out from Headley’s interrogation is that the ISI has had a much more significant role to play (in the attacks),” said Pillai, the top-ranking official in charge of domestic security.
“The same goes for Hafiz Saeed. He was not a peripheral player. He knew everything.” India has handed over to Pakistan several dossiers of evidence, including against Saeed, but Islamabad says there are no grounds to try the LeT chief.
Pillai said he was hopeful that Pakistan would share information on steps it has taken against the Mumbai planners. “We have given them a whole series of data and information that we have. We have given them the names, we have given them the descriptions, we have given them what their height is or their complexion is,” he said. “Now it is up to them.”
Indian External Affairs Minister SM Krishna said on Wednesday that India expected Pakistan to act on confessions by terror suspect David Coleman Headley over the Mumbai terror attack.
Krishna also said that frequent anti-India statements by Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Saeed, who is considered the mastermind of the November 2008 Mumbai attack, were not contributing to improving India-Pakistan ties. “India expects some response (to Headley’s confessions),” the minister told Indian journalists, just two hours after arriving here on a three-day visit. “I am here to find out just what that response is,” reported IANS. He quickly added: “We expect a satisfactory response (from Pakistan).”
He said the Pakistan government “will have to act” because it has been presented with “such irrefutable evidence” on Headley’s involvement with the Mumbai attack that left 166 Indians and foreigners dead.
Krishna also said that Saeed had been “consistently making statements and speeches which provoke people of Pakistan against India. Such tirades against India will not help smoothen our relations.”
