By Sanjay Kumar
India-Pakistan talks fell apart again and both sides share the blame.
Nisid Hajari, in his book, Midnight’s Furies, says that the time has come when “the heirs of Nehru and Jinnah put 1947’s furies to rest.” He suggests that India and Pakistan both invest in peace rather than in conflict.
The way scheduled talks between the National Security Advisors (NSA) of the two neighbors were aborted—without any preliminary rounds—suggests peace between remains as elusive today as it was six decades ago.
One questions the rationale and wisdom of cancelling talks just a day before they were supposed to start while both nations resort to semantics to justify their rigidness.
New Delhi placed preconditions before Islamabad that the the Pakistani NSA, Sartaj Aziz, could not meet separatist leaders from Kashmir (the Hurriyat) before talks during his Delhi visit. But Pakistan refused to follow any red lines drawn by India for starting the talks. The stalemate could not be resolved and Aziz cancelled his scheduled flight to Delhi on Sunday.
Last year, foreign secretary-level talks were cancelled days before they could start for exactly the same reason.
It’s normal for Pakistani leaders and representatives to interact with Hurriyat leaders whenever they visit India. Previous Indian governments used to hardly take notice of these meetings. For Islamabad, the pro-Pakistani separatists are the real representatives of the people of India-occupied Kashmir.
Read the full story at The Diplomat