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Pakistan Hopes Peace Dialogue With India Will Remain on Track, Pakistani Foreign Minister Says By Mike Nartker WASHINGTON — Pakistan hopes the new Indian government led by the Congress party will continue with a peace dialogue orchestrated by former Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s foreign minister said Friday (see GSN, May 18). In January, Musharraf and Vajpayee announced the launch of a joint dialogue intended to resolve several outstanding issues between the two nuclear-armed rivals, including the disputed region of Kashmir. Earlier this month, though, Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was defeated by the Congress party in national parliamentary elections. As a result, Vajpayee stepped down as prime minister and the position has been filled by Manmohan Singh. The change in Indian leadership has affected India and Pakistan’s plans to hold this week talks on nuclear confidence-building measures, according to reports. The Gulf News reported today that India delayed the talks because an external affairs minister has yet to be named. During remarks Friday at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri said that he hoped the Congress party would continue with the peace dialogue established by its predecessor. So far, the new Indian government has made “promising statements” regarding the dialogue, Kasuri said. In a brief reply to written questions posed by Global Security Newswire soon after the Indian elections, the Indian Embassy in Washington said the Congress party had made clear its desire to pursue strong relations with Pakistan. “There is consensus on major foreign policy issues … so I think the rest of the world need not have any anxiety about India at all,” an embassy spokesman said. Kasuri on Friday also called on the BJP, which retains a sizable presence in the Indian Parliament, to not establish “roadblocks” to the dialogue. He added, though, that senior Indian officials had indicated that the party remained committed to the dialogue. In a telephone interview with GSN earlier this month, Michael Krepon, founding president of the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, speculated that the BJP could change its stance on the dialogue if the new government was seen to be making progress. In a prepared text distributed after his remarks Friday, Kasuri said that the dialogue must move beyond the issue of nuclear risk reduction to address “the real issues” between the two countries, primarily Kashmir. “We must realize that CBMs are not an end in themselves,” Kasuri said in his prepared statement. Krepon told GSN, though, that Pakistan has indicated a willingness to relax its past policy of requiring progress on Kashmir before agreeing to implement nuclear risk reduction measures. The change in Islamabad’s position, he said, resulted from the scandal surrounding the nuclear proliferation activities of top Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. The Khan scandal has forced Pakistan to demonstrate that it is “responsible concerning nuclear issues,” Krepon said.
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