ISLAMABAD, Oct 27: India has suggested two sets of dates in November for air link talks and Pakistan will soon respond to that, Foreign Office spokesman Masood Khan said on Monday.
Referring to the 12 Confidence-Building Measures (CBMs) announced by India on Oct 22, the spokesman said at his weekly news briefing that Pakistan was not yet prepared to pronounce its response.
Answering questions, he said: “We are considering the Indian proposals very seriously and internal consultations are under way. We are not prepared for (our) response yet. But in due course we shall give our reaction very soon”.
“We are not running down these proposals. We will give robust response and our response will be constructive,” the spokesman said.
In fact, he pointed out, Pakistan had been insisting for long on the resumption of comprehensive composite dialogue, a result-oriented dialogue, which should include everything. Mr Khan was answering a question whether those were all new Indian proposals or, in some instances, the same ones that were originally proposed by Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali long time ago on which Indian response was awaited.
The spokesman said what irked Pakistan was that New Delhi had excluded some of the proposals from Mr Jamali’s package such as the issues of Kashmir, Siachen, etc.
Criticizing some parts of the statements of Indian External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha and Defence Minister George Fernandes, he said those utterances revealed “blatant insincerity” on the part of New Delhi.
He said those statements confirmed Pakistan’s worst fears that the move (CBMs) aimed at misleading and hoodwinking the international community, and described the 12-point imitative as a “package of fraud”.
About the statement of Mr Fernandes, the spokesman said it showed his “typical intemperate” language of a war-monger aiming at serving ends of domestic politics.
He said the defence minister appeared to be holding a gun in one hand and a piece of paper with CBMs written on it in the other, which could hardly overawe Pakistan. The spokesman advised Delhi to better engage in business of peace and sanity in dealing with Pakistan.
