The foreign secretaries of Pakistan and India were due to meet in mid-January after talks were announced following Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s surprise visit to Lahore in late December 2015. The officials were due to discuss measures for carrying forward the Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue, which had been announced earlier in December 2015.
But the attack on a military airbase in Pathankot in Indian Punjab in January cast doubts on the talks. The meeting was eventually postponed.
However, a senior official, who is part of the government’s core team on the peace process with India, said in a background briefing that the two neighbours have secretly discussed options for creating a mechanism for ‘uninterrupted and irreversible’ dialogue process immune to such developments.
“We are telling the Indian government that let’s take the Pathankot attack as a test case as far as the peace process is concerned,” the official said.
He added that Pakistan, through its National Security Adviser Lt Gen (retd) Nasser Khan Janjua, had conveyed to India its concerns about the danger of dialogue process being disrupted by the attack.
“We should not let this happen. If talks are cancelled now, then it will take many months or may be years to recreate the same goodwill and positivity we currently have,” the official cautioned.
Indeed, the Pathankot incident disrupting dialogue is not the first time that planned talks have been cancelled. Talks scheduled between the foreign secretaries of the two countries had been scheduled for January 2013, but they fell through after a prolonged spell of skirmishes along the Line of Control.
Both countries then agreed to resume secretary-level talks in August 2014 but India cancelled them on the pretext that Pakistan was interfering by meeting Kashmiri leaders. The NSAs of the two countries were then scheduled to meet in August 2015, but again the talks fell through as Pakistan objected to India limiting the agenda to terrorism.
The official said that one of the options that the two countries were currently considering involved a permanent mechanism under which NSAs from both sides remain engaged irrespective of the state of relations between the two countries.
He added that this has been tested somewhat in the aftermath of Pathankot. Since the attack on January 2, Pakistani NSA and his Indian counterpart have been in constant touch.
“The benefit of these contacts is that both countries have acted maturely after the Pathankot attack,” the official said.
He said Pakistan was pushing for breaking the decades-long ‘status quo’ in its ties with India.
“If we do not break this status quo, our next generations will certainly do that, so why don’t we take the plunge,” the official added.
He said Pakistan had made it clear that it will not allow its soil to be used against India or any other country.
Pakistan had not only condemned the Pathankot airbase attack but also offered its assistance to India in investigations, taking into custody several members of the banned militant outfit Jaish-e-Muhammad, including some of its leaders. Several seminaries linked to the group were also closed as a special investigation team was formed by the prime minister to probe the links India claimed the attackers had in Pakistan.
Although both countries have agreed to reschedule the foreign secretaries meeting “soon”, neither side has provided a definite time line yet as to when the meeting would take place.
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