With the Congress now backing him fully on the Indo-Pak joint statement at Sharm el-Sheikh,Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will look to make a case for India acting as a responsible country and engaging Pakistan on terror on Wednesday. At the same time,sources said,Singh is expected to make it clear that there will be no composite dialogue until Pakistan takes more concrete measures on terrorism directed from its soil against India. To that extent,India feels that Pakistans 36-page dossier on the progress of investigations is a 'step forward' but more needs to be done. Despite stiff opposition to the joint statement from the BJP and its partners,who even took the matter to Rashtrapati Bhavan on Tuesday,and unhelpful statements from Pakistan on the lack of evidence to arrest Lashkar-e-Toiba founder Hafiz Mohammed Saeed,sources said,there are no second thoughts in the government. It is learnt that the dossier has been reviewed thoroughly with legal experts also being roped in to study the Pakistan anti-terror law carefully to ensure that appropriate clauses have been applied. Sources said no gap was found and that the Indian side is encouraged by the progress. But keeping out Jamaat-ud-Dawa from the dossier and the chargesheet to ensure no links can be drawn with the Lashkar is being seen as a deliberate attempt to delink founder Hafiz Mohammed Saeed from the Mumbai case. This was validated when Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik told Geo TV today: We do not have any proof against Hafiz Saeed. We have demanded and we are demanding from India that if you have proof,give (it to) us,but do not do propaganda. I assure we will take action. But just on hearsay we cannot arrest our citizen.if New Delhi wants some credible action,it needs to provide substantiated evidence. For India,the fact that Saeed founded and now heads the organisation which carried out the attack is sufficient evidence of his complicity. This is only strengthened by the fact that he was put in the UN Al-Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions List soon after the Mumbai attacks. But details aside,sources said,the PM will explain his overall approach to keep Pakistan engaged on the issue. In many ways,the government feels that pushing and prodding through periodic interactions helps sustain the pressure better than not meeting at all. The dossier and the chargesheet are being seen as outcomes of the candid conversations in the past couple of months. On Balochistan,the PM is clear that India has nothing to hide and so there is nothing unsettling about discussing the matter with Pakistan. The other explanation coming from official circles is that India cannot do much if Pakistan wants to bring its internal issues to the bilateral agenda. Despite this new interpretation,the fact remains that India had always resisted any discussion on Balochistan with Pakistan and so the joint statement is a shift from Indias past position.
