NEW DELHI, July 10: India obliquely told the United States on Wednesday that its efforts to nudge New Delhi and Islamabad towards a dialogue would not succeed and accused Pakistan of not helping at all in making it conducive for any talks to be envisaged.
“Dialogue can be resumed only when there is a climate conducive for it,” Foreign Office spokesperson Nirupama Rao told reporters. She was commenting on United States Secretary of State Colin Powell’s remarks underscoring the need for India and Pakistan to resume their dialogue to reduce tensions.
Ms Rao stressed that such a climate could be created only when Pakistan put a “permanent end to infiltration, cross-border terrorism and took visible and credible action to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism.”
She said that after the May 27 assurance by President Pervez Musharraf there had been a “30 per cent fall in infiltration.”
“This was a temporary phenomenon since infiltration levels picked up again. In the last week of June, we saw at least three incidents of attempts to infiltrate,” she said.
“A 30 per cent fall in infiltration is not reason enough for resumption of dialogue,” she said.
The Press Trust of India said Powell is likely to visit India and Pakistan later this month.
Meanwhile, India and the US are expected to begin the fifth round of talks on terrorism in Washington from Thursday.
Ms Rao said the issues to be discussed were anti-terrorism training, intelligence-sharing, Al Qaeda and cyber security.
Officials from the country’s ministries of external affairs, home and defence, the national security council and the bureau of civil aviation security would participate in the dialogue, she said.
Powell had said on Tuesday that trying to improve relations between India and Pakistan was not easy.
“It is a very difficult issue. And what we are trying to do now is to make sure that both the Indians and the Pakistanis understand that the United States is interested in them beyond this crisis.
‘‘We want a good relationship with India on every aspect of that relationship, economic, trade cooperation, military cooperation. The same thing with Pakistan,” he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“We are anxious to get through this crisis and see a dialogue begin between the two sides so that we can start to move forward to help find a solution to the problem in Kashmir ultimately,” Powell said, possibly to underscore at least part of his agenda later this month.
Another issue that has apparently annoyed New Delhi is the fact that the US last month said Pakistan had “significantly” curbed infiltration across the Line of Control but it could not know everything taking place in the rugged terrain.
“The Pakistani side has, by all reports, significantly reduced infiltration across the LoC. They cannot probably know everything that is taking place because it is a very rugged land just as the area between Afghanistan and Pakistan is very rugged terrain,” Defence Secretary Doland Rumsfeld told a press conference at the World Press Centre at the state department.
Moreover, ignoring New Delhi’s unhappiness, the United States has justified the travel advisory for India saying such actions are the result of a very careful assessment.
“We work very closely with our embassies. We do a very careful assessment. We make a decision based on all possible views and information,” State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher said recently.
India says American fears of a nuclear war are misplaced and have begun to hurt its economy.
