|
Musharraf drops plan to attend SAARC Summit |
 |
The much-talked about meeting between Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the sidelines of the SAARC Summit in Dhaka early next month will not materialize since Shaukat Aziz will now head Pakistani delegation. It was widely hoped that after the last SAARC summit held in Islamabad, Musharraf would attend the Dhaka summit and use the occasion for a meeting with Manmohan Singh to discuss the progress made in India-Pakistan relations ever since the two Governments decided to resume the dialogue. Although a meeting between the two Prime Ministers will definitely take place in Dhaka, any contact between India and Pakistan at this level there will not have the same degree of poetical importance as a meeting between Musharraf and Manmohan Singh.
Announcing the decision of Islamabad that Shaukat Aziz will lead the Pakistan delegation to Dhaka, the Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokesman, however, did not rule out a meeting between Musharraf and Manmohan Singh in the “very near future.” According to sources, the spokesman’s reference was to an invitation extended by the Pakistan President to Manmohan Singh to visit Islamabad and the acceptance of the invitation by Dr. Singh.
The Foreign Secretaries of the two countries are scheduled to meet this month. They are expected to be together in Islamabad in February when Indian External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh goes there at the invitation of his Pakistani counterpart, Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri.
These meetings are expected to provide a further momentum to the second round of the composite phase. However, the talks on confidence-building measures have so far made only limited progress. The bus service between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad (PoK) has got delayed because of differences over the type of documents to be used for commuters to cross the Line of Control. Pakistan is opposed to using passports for travel because it would weaken its claim to the whole of Kashmir. The restoration of the railway link between Munabao and Khokhrapar in Rajasthan and Sindh will have to wait for more than two years. While New Delhi says it will be ready to restore the rail link by October 2 next, Pakistan has raised technical difficulties saying it needs to convert the track to broad gauge from the metre gauge to match it with the track on the Indian side and it will take some time. Nor is there any agreement on the Pakistani demand for the clearance of a proposal for an Indo-Iran gas pipeline passing through Pakistani soil and its rejection of Indian suggestion for a pipeline from Jalandhar to Lahore for the supply of diesel by India to Pakistan.
The talks on two more issues held in Islamabad and New Delhi respectively made limited progress. While officials of the two countries exchanged a draft Memorandum of Understanding on steps to be taken to deal with drug trafficking and narcotics control, the talks on nuclear and conventional CBMs held in Islamabad ended merely with the “hope” that a hotline between the Foreign Secretaries will be operationalised soon to reduce the risk of nuclear misunderstandings.
|
