NEW DELHI - Could the India-Pakistan NSA-level dialogue have been saved by facilitating simultaneously a short and separate meeting between the foreign secretaries?
While both sides publicly sparred over Hurriyat and accused each other of tampering with the Ufa agenda, it turns out that it was refusal by India for a meeting between Pakistan's foreign secretary Aizaz Chaudhry and his Indian counterpart S Jaishankar which finally put paid to any hope of holding the NSA dialogue, Times of India in an article said Friday. On August 21, 3 days before the scheduled meeting between NSA Ajit Doval and his counterpart Sartaj Aziz, India officially conveyed to Pakistan that a meeting between the foreign secretaries was not going to be possible.
Pakistan had proposed the meeting to discuss modalities for further discussions on what it describes as the core issue of Kashmir.? This was important for Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif himself as he was keen to convey at home that the issue remained as significant as ever for Pakistan, after he allowed India to not mention J&K in the Ufa statement.
According to Indian officials, a meeting between the foreign secretaries wasn't possible because that was not a part of the understanding the two sides arrived at in the Ufa meeting between Sharif and PM Narendra Modi on July 10.
Pakistan believes that the NSA talks were taking place after two crucial back-to-back concessions by Sharif-led civilian government to India. In Ufa, Sharif backtracked after initially insisting that J&K be mentioned in the statement read out jointly by the foreign secretaries.
This was after India insisted that the mention of "all outstanding issues" in the statement was enough to convey Pakistan's focus on the Kashmir issue in the meeting between Sharif and Modi. Sharif relented, as top sources confirmed to TOI, in a decision which was completely his own.
Indian officials and the BJP were quick to project no mention of J&K and condemnation of terrorism "in all its forms" in the Ufa statement as a victory for India.
The second concession, according to Pakistan, is the fact that Aziz agreed to come to India for a dialogue with Doval despite the latter's relatively junior status in the government. As adviser to Sharif on foreign and security affairs, Aziz is effectively the foreign minister of Pakistan and enjoys the status of a cabinet minister. Doval is a secretary rank official.
"Coming after the Ufa concession by Sharif, agreeing to Sushma Swaraj's preconditions would have been suicidal for the Pakistan government, pressure or no pressure from authorities which India is talking about," said a Pakistan source.
In her press briefing on August 22, foreign minister Sushma Swaraj declared that NSA talks could only take place if Pakistan agreed to a terror-only agenda and Aziz refrained from meeting the Kashmir separatists, both described as preconditions by Islamabad.
Swaraj blamed Pakistan for focusing only on the "preambular" part of the Ufa statement which referred to all outstanding issues and for ignoring the operative portion which mentioned dialogue between NSAs to discuss all issues connected to terrorism. Pakistan, however, says it itself was not keen on shifting the focus away from terrorism in NSA talks and hence it suggested a separate dialogue between the foreign secretaries the same day.