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India, Pakistan top diplomats hold peace talks

27 July 2011 02:41 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. India and Pakistan’s foreign ministers were set Wednesday to hold their first talks in a year, looking to breathe fresh life into a peace process still stifled by the trauma of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, APA reports quoting news.yahoo.com website.

India suspended contacts with its arch-rival after the attacks and their peace dialogue has struggled to gain any real traction since its formal resumption earlier this year in an atmosphere of mutual recrimination and mistrust.

Observers expect little to emerge from Wednesday’s meeting beyond some modest confidence-building measures connected to relatively uncontentious issues such as cross-border trade and people-to-people contacts.

And India will likely take the opportunity to press Pakistan once again to clamp down on anti-India militant groups like the Lashker-e-Taiba (LeT) -- blamed for the Mumbai assault.

For the moment, however, the two sides seem more focused on simply keeping the dialogue alive and steadying a volatile relationship between the nuclear-armed neighbours that has contributed to decades of instability in South Asia.

Arriving Wednesday in New Delhi, Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar stressed the need for both countries to learn from, but not be burdened by, "the lessons of history."

They should move forward as "friendly neighbours, who have a stake in each other’s future and who understand the responsibility that both the countries have to the region," she said.

India and Pakistan are jockeying for influence in Afghanistan ahead of the planned US troop withdrawal and Washington sees working India-Pakistan ties as crucial to Afghanistan’s post-war viability.

"It is the Afghan dynamic .... that will define the regional context for Indo-Pak relations for years to come," said C. Raja Mohan, a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

The talks with her Indian counterpart, S.M. Krishna mark a high-profile debut for Khar, who was only appointed last week as Pakistan’s first woman foreign minister.

At just 34 years of age, questions have been raised over whether she is experienced enough to handle one of the world’s most fraught cross-border relationships which has led to three wars since 1947.

Krishna is 45 years her senior.

Khar comes from one of Pakistan’s leading political and land-owning clans and some observers say her elevation is evidence that Pakistan is still run by select family dynasties.

"The people in power, including the military, are comfortable that she will follow whatever brief is given to her," Pakistan foreign policy analyst Hasan Askari told AFP.

"She will not make waves," he added.

Before the talks, Khar met Tuesday at the Pakistani High Commission in New Delhi with separatist leaders from Indian Kashmir.

The seemingly intractable territorial dispute over Kashmir was the trigger for two of the three Indo-Pakistan wars and has repeatedly scuppered previous attempts at a comprehensive peace deal.

Alexander Neil, an Asia analyst at the London-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), said that levels of distrust between the two countries were still far too high to push the dialogue ahead in any meaningful way.

"Public statements will be made on cooperation against terrorism but in reality there will not be any substantive progress... and the net result, I am sure, is simply that the status quo is maintained," Neil told AFP last week.

The foreign secretaries of both countries met in New Delhi on Tuesday for what the Indian side described as "cordial and positive" talks to prepare the way for the foreign ministers’ discussions.