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Nirmala George
NEW DELHI, Sept 22: After years of semantics on how to talk, India and Pakistan are now prepared to do the actual talking. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif, when they meet on Wednesday in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, will announce a ``calendar'' of talks which is expected to put the stalemated dialogue back on the rails.
The format, hammered out after five rounds of meetings between the foreign secretaries of the two countries at Durban, South Africa, brings in two new elements into the existing agenda: Peace, security and confidence-building measures and Jammu and Kashmir issue.
These two issues will be in addition to the six other items on the regular Indo-Pak dialogue agenda, namely Siachen, Sir Creek, the Wullar barrage (Tulbul navigation project), terrorism, people-to-people exchanges, and economic and commercial cooperation.
Underscoring the importance of the first two issues, confidence-building measures, peace and securityand Kashmir, would be taken up to the level of the Foreign Secretaries, while the remaining agenda will be entrusted to working groups to thrash out the finer details.
The Vajpayee-Sharif meeting on the margins of the UNGA gains added significance since the international community has had its eyes trained on the two latest entrants into the nuclear club.
A cordial meeting between Vajpayee and Sharif, with an agreement on a well-calibrated time-table to resolve their differences across the negotiating table should assuage primarily Western concerns about any conflict breaking out between the world's newest nuclear states.
Though the Shimla Agreement had called for discussions on Kashmir, New Delhi had baulked at Pakistan's insistence on Kashmir being designated the status of the ``core'' issue, with discussions on all other issues being predicated by progress on this single front.
Pakistan's obstinacy on listing Kashmir as the core issue, and its demand that a separate working group be set up todiscuss Kashmir had led to protracted delays with no forward movement in the talks for a protracted length of time.
After the June 1997 meeting, there was considerable confusion on both sides on the interpretation of the agreement reached at the bilateral talks, since it called on the two countries to set up ``a mechanism including working groups at appropriate levels'' to deal with all issues in an integrated manner. According to security analysts this was deliberately left ambiguous so that each country could interpret the outcome of the dialogue to suit its domestic compulsions.
In the long-drawn pas-de-deux between the two sides, another forward movement came in January 1998, when the then Prime Minister I K Gujral and Sharif met at the tripartite summit in Dhaka and agreed to end the stalemate by taking up all the eight issues simultaneously.
With a degree of flexibility, both sides have shown a degree of give and take. India has conceded to Pakistan's demand that Kashmir merits separatetreatment, away from other issues. For India, the advantage lies in the enlargement of the focus to include peace, confidence-building measures and security.
Domestic compulsions on both sides dictate that progress in the talks will be slow. Pakistan is not likely to change its spots and give up overnight its habit of raising the Kashmir issue everytime it has an international audience. It will be a long haul before tangible results become evident.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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This story was printed from Net Express located at http://www.expressindia.com. Net Express provides a portal to India, with news from The Indian Express and The Financial Express along with sites on travel and tourism, the entertainment industry, the power sector, the environment and much more.
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