India’s new Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee is expected in Pakistan on Saturday for talks that are likely to show that a three-year-old peace process is on track even though no breakthrough appears near.
It is more than 15 months since the last visit by an Indian foreign minister to Islamabad, and while Mukherjee was only appointed in October, the Pakistani leadership know him well from his previous job as defence minister.
The upcoming ministerial talks come hard on the heels of a series of positive sounds from both capitals on the core dispute over Kashmir, the mostly Muslim Himalayan region that has been the cause of two of the three wars India and Pakistan have fought since the partition of the subcontinent 60 years ago.
”Nothing concrete will come out of the talks, but they may now discuss the possibility of how to move substantially on Kashmir,” Talat Masood, a retired Pakistan army general turned analyst, said.
G Parthasarathy, a former Indian envoy to Pakistan, struck a similar note of cautious optimism, noting an exchange of ideas on the approach to the Kashmir problem.
”The very fact that there is a dialogue on Kashmir and we are discussing proposals shows that we are handling it. It’s taken us 34 years since the Shimla Agreement to get there, but at least we are discussing it,” he said, referring to a 1972 accord signed after the last war.
Pakistan is expecting a visit from moderate separatist politicians from Indian Kashmir a few days after Mukherjee’s goes home.
Hopes for Singh’s visit
Pakistan hopes Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will finally make his first visit to Islamabad in the next few months, but he is only expected to come if there is a significant agreement to be reached.
In the meantime, Mukherjee will deliver a formal invitation to Musharraf to attend a summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation due in New Delhi in April.
Relations have been complicated by Islamabad’s distrust of India’s growing friendship with Afghanistan, on Pakistan’s western border.
But, Musharraf has been trying hard to mend relations with India after militant bomb attacks killed 186 people in Mumbai on July 11 and forced New Delhi to call for a time-out in the peace process.
Last month, Musharraf repeated an offer for Pakistan to give up its claim on Kashmir if India agreed to soften the border dividing Kashmiris and let them administer their own affairs with oversight from both Islamabad and New Delhi.
India is agreeable to the long term goal of softening the border, without any redrawing of a ceasefire line that represents the de-facto frontier, but autonomy and joint oversight goes further than New Delhi wants.
While Singh didn’t respond directly to Musharraf’s renewed offer, he did welcome a phased approach to resolving Kashmir’s problems, and on Monday at a business conference in New Delhi, the Indian leader reaffirmed his desire for lasting peace with Pakistan.
Over the past couple of years hopes of headway have centred on the possibility of demilitarising the Siachen Glacier, a high altitude icy wasteland that the two armies have fought over for two decades, or by settling a territorial dispute over Sir Creek — an estuary flowing into the Arabian Sea.
But for now, officials are dampening expectations.
”You can’t expect a breakthrough every time the two sides meet. They will discuss many of the key issues and ways to take them forward,” an Indian foreign ministry official, who did not want to be identified, said. – Reuters