In a clear message to Pakistan that it can’t be business-as-usual after the brutal beheading of Indian soldiers a couple of months ago, India showed due courtesy to the visiting Pakistani prime minister, but kept politics off the agenda.
Raja Pervez Ashraf prayed at the much-revered 13th-century Sufi shrine of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti at Ajmer in northern India, and is understood to have prayed for peace and harmony between India and Pakistan, the two prickly neighbours known for their accident-prone ties.
India’s External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid (March 9) hosted a lunch for Ashraf, who is India on a day-long visit, at Rambagh Palace, the elite hotel in Jaipur. In a statement, he said he was welcoming the Pakistani leader with “open arms,” but underlined that there were no “official talks.”
“It’s in our culture to welcome our guests with open arms,” said Khurshid. “Today it was a private visit. There were no official talks. We will do it at an appropriate time,” he added.
After lunch, Ashraf flew to Ajmer where he prayed at the beloved sufi shrine that attracts devotees from all religions and transcend sectarian orthodoxies.
Ashraf’s day-long visit came a day after the mild-mannered Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh surprised many by his no-nonsense talk on the machinery of cross-border terror in the Indian parliament March 8.
The contrast between Ashraf’s visit and that of Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari in April last year could not be starker and showed a disturbing drift that has crept into the India-Pakistan relations which were moving on a positive trajectory, but was derailed by sharp rhetoric following the brutal killing of two Indian soldiers by Pakistani soldiers Jan 8 this year.
Like Ashraf, Zardari, too, had come on a private pilgrimage, but New Delhi had quickly leveraged his presence to impart a fresh momentum to the revived dialogue process. This time round, unlike the feverish buzz that surrounded Zardari’s visit, there was not even enough speculation about what was discussed.
More than two years after after the Mumbai terror mayhem orchestrated by Pakistani militants, India and Pakistan had quietly revived their stalled dialogue process in February 2011 in Thimphu and vowed to open a new chapter in bilateral relations in the picturesque Indian Ocean island of the Maldives in November 2011.
India has made it clear yet again that there can’t be normalisation of relations unless the terror issue is addressed upfront by the Pakistani establishment.
“People to people contacts have gone up, trade relations have shown improvement,” Manmohan Singh said in the Rajya Sabha (upper House) March 8. “But there cannot be normalisation of relations between our two countries unless and until the terror machine which is still active in Pakistan is brought under control,” he said.
-India Writes Network
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