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India, Pakistan still differ on issues

27 February 2010 01:07 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. The visiting Pakistan Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir on Friday called on Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna before wrapping up his two-day tour of the country, APA reports quoting â€œGulfnewsâ€ newspaper.
Accompanied by Pakistan’s High Commissioner Shahid Malek, the meeting which was officially listed as a courtesy call ended up as the second round of talks between the two estranged neighbours.
India and Pakistan had its first bilateral foreign secretary level talks in 15 months on Thursday.
According to a foreign ministry official, during their hour-long meeting they discussed several key issues including India’s concern over continued cross border terrorism and Islamabad’s reluctance to bring all perpetrators of 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks that led New Delhi to call off interaction with Islamabad at all levels.
The meeting took place amidst suggestions that Thursday talks were big failure in view of both sides sticking to their known divergent stands on a variety of issues.
Some of Bashir’s post-meeting utterances on Thursday did not go down well with the Indian side as these were seen as Islamabad’s virtually turning its back on India’s terror-related concerns.
Despite New Delhi’s insistence that they intended to start off by discussing continued use of Pakistani soil for terror attacks in India before graduating to the next level of discussions, Pakistan persisted with its demand to start the stalled Composite Dialogue and repeating that the only solution to the strained Indo-Pak ties lay in resolving the 62-year-old Kashmir imbroglio.
Bashir’s comment that over 7,000 Mumbai-like terror attacks had taken place in Pakistan irked New Delhi which saw it as insincerity.