After a hectic day of back-toback engagements, Kasuri said India’s insistence that Pakistan is to be blamed for everything that is going wrong between the two countries is proving to be counter-productive and snuffing out any opportunity for a rapprochement.
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India and Pakistan should remainfirm to not let the dialogue process get affected by “negative forces” and should encourage people-to-people contact and cultural exchanges to maintain normal bilateral relations, former Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri said on Sunday.
The “rise of the right-wing” in India could have toxic effects regionally, said a leading Pakistani daily, which warned that alarm bells are ringing and “India needs to reaffirm its commitment to pluralism and diversity”.
The Pakistani experience has also made terribly clear the destabilising effects on the region when intolerance and extremism is on the march nationally.
Diplomatic stand-off between India and Pakistan would have ended in New York, on eve of the UN General Assembly session last month, but for Islamabad’s insistence to combine National Security Advisor (NSA) meeting, as decided between the two prime ministers at the Russian city of Ufa, with a meeting of two foreign ministers as well. He said former foreign minister had gone to India for the launch of his book and he was the guest of that country. There has to be recognition that non-practise of terrorism is central to the betterment of the relationship. “If they are in denial of that, how can talks have a objective?”
According to Kasuri, Pakistan had provided India with addresses of terrorist camps operating in Kashmir as part of its deal to bring peace to the Kashmir Valley. “It is not asking for too much”, they said.
“There still remains interest in NSA-level talks”. Pakistan can’t take away from the centrality of terror to our issues. “They did not dispute it. But obviously their domestic politics took them in a different direction from the Ufa”. He considers the Indian actor a great icon for India and Pakistan.
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“If you do accept it, there is logical flow out of it. If you don’t, it goes elsewhere”.
