NEW DELHI: Likening the history of India-Pakistan talks to a heavily potholed road, Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj said on Saturday that regardless of the ups and downs along the way, the journey would have to be completed through talks, and that war had never solved anything in the world.

Ms Swaraj set near impossible preconditions for the (now cancelled) national security adviser-level talks at her press conference, which looked more designed to deter than to welcome the Pakistan delegation to New Delhi. However, she sounded sanguine that the current stalemate was of a piece with similar setbacks dotting their common path. The briefing preceded the announcement about cancellation of the New Delhi talks slated for Sunday.

The minister said India and Pakistan were signatories to the Shimla agreement, which prescribed a strictly bilateral dialogue to resolve their disputes, including Kashmir’s fate. As such, she contended, there was no room for a third party, be they Hurriyat Conference or anyone else to claim participatory rights in an India-Pakistan discussion.

The spirit of the Shimla pact, therefore, settled the issue of Mr Aziz’s desire to meet Kashmir’s resistance leaders during his abandoned Delhi visit. Ms Swaraj insisted that the Ufa mandate clearly stipulated that the NSA-level talks would be limited to terrorism and violence. She accused the Pakistan side of wrongly conflating the preamble of their joint understanding in Russia with the “operative” part of the Ufa mandate to the NSA talks.

“It is wrong of Mr Aziz to say that we are running away from discussing all the other issues with Pakistan. The Delhi meeting was proposed to create the right atmosphere for resumption of the normal dialogue.”

In reply to a question, she said New Delhi and Islamabad had been travelling a difficult road to peace. “It is a journey full of difficult potholes. Sometimes the vehicle would get a flat wheel. Sometimes the springs would collapse. Inevitably, we would get up and resume the journey.”

In contrast to the vitriol on Indian channels about the abandoned talks, Ms Swaraj sounded assuring, albeit firm or even occasionally terse. “The most intractable problems in the world can only be solved through dialogue. War has never solved anything,” she said.

The future lay with talks, and not militarist postures, between the two nuclear-armed neighbours, she observed.

MEDIA HEARSAY: A reporter from a channel known for screaming insults at Pakistan invited her to consider the evidence his channel had allegedly secured to pin Dawood Ibrahim’s hideout in Karachi. “Two governments don’t discuss issues on media hearsay. And whatever evidence we have on anything will not be discussed with you before we share it with our Pakistani interlocutors.”

Someone asked her if she found it wrong on the part of former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to allow meetings between the Hurriyat leaders and Pakistani visitors, she snapped: “Let bygones be bygones.”

She chided Mr Aziz for showing three purported dossiers on an Indian agency’s subversive work in Pakistan during his press conference in Islamabad. “I consider Mr Aziz to be a person of serious deportment. So I was surprised to see him flashing the dossiers to press… These things are done in a structured way. Dossiers are supposed to be a serious piece of evidence.”

She blamed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif for the events leading to the cancellation of the Delhi talks, saying he had been put under severe pressure by hawks in Pakistan to abandon “the anti-terror talks he agreed to in Ufa”.

Published in Dawn, August 23rd, 2015

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