NEW DELHI, Oct 12: “Will Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee hold talks with the new Pakistan prime minister as a way of getting out of the anti-Musharraf bind that much of the ruling establishment in New Delhi finds itself in?” Senior western diplomats said on Thursday that the new prime minister could indeed hold the key to the deadlock.
“If not for the longer substantial part, for the immediate purposes of resuming the momentum, a message of greetings from one prime minister to the other upon his or her election could signal the way ahead,” one diplomat said on condition of anonymity.
The next station to watch would be the Saarc summit due in January in Islamabad, which India has promised to attend.
Analysts said a more immediate clue to the way ahead would be available after Vajpayee holds formal talks with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair is expected to take up the South Asian issue from where US Secretary of State Colin Powell left it on Tuesday when he said that resumption of talks between India and Pakistan was high on Washington’s agenda after the polls in Kashmir and Pakistan.
In a move apparently linked with all the pressure from the West, Vajpayee has reportedly convened a joint meeting of the National Security Council, the National Security Advisory Board and the Strategic Policy Group on Oct 16, India Abroad newspaper reported this week.
The last time such a high-powered joint security meeting was held was in June 1999, at the height of the Kargil conflict to discuss India’s options.
It said faced with unremitting violence from militants in Kashmir and by extension in Gujarat on the one hand and by the prodding from Washington to move into dialogue mode on the other — Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca conveyed just such a message in New Delhi last fortnight — Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishan Advani suggested that the high-power meeting wrestle with the decision at a half-day session on Oct 16.
The National Security Advisory Board has been discussing India’s options vis-a-vis Pakistan. Some of its hawkish members have suggested to the government to adopt a proactive policy on terrorism and carry the battle into Pakistani territory, the newspaper said.
It said the alternative suggestion facing India is that it suggests a resumption of dialogue not on wide-ranging topics, but narrowed down to the nuclear confidence-building issue. This, it is felt, will be in harmony with the suggestions made in the February 1999 Lahore Declaration between Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif.
Such a step, it is felt, would be the one way of beating the US pressure to resume talks. The two views are likely to be circulated and debated at the Oct 16 meeting.
Indian news agencies quoted US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher as saying that while Washington was supportive of the polls in Kashmir, it did not believe that would solve the problem of Kashmir which needed talks between India and Pakistan.
“The United States has always supported free and fair elections in Kashmir, held without outside interference and violence. Throughout this process, we have condemned the extremist attempts to disrupt voting in Kashmir,” Boucher, said.
However, he added that the elections could not solve the problems between India and Pakistan though they were an important step that could lead to resumption of dialogue.
When asked whether the US was pleased with the way the Kashmir polls went off, Boucher said: “We will look to the vote count before making any particular judgments. We are pleased that efforts were made to keep them (elections) as open and as fair as possible”.
In New York, State Department deputy spokesman Philip Reeker urged India and Pakistan to restrain their nuclear and missiles programmes and instead find a way to resolve their differences.
“We have particularly said that there should be no forward deployment of operational nuclear missiles,” Reeker told international media.