Islamabad, July 09: Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and India’s Manmohan Singh will meet on the margins of a summit in Egypt next week, raising hopes about a resumption of peace talks, officials said Thursday.
Relations between the two nuclear-armed rivals plummeted to a new low in the wake of last November’s deadly attacks in Mumbai. India blamed the carnage on militants based in Pakistan and froze four years of peace dialogue in response.
But the re-election of Singh in May and the first meeting a month later between him and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari since the Mumbai atrocities have paved the way to revived hopes of peace.
“The prime minister will be meeting, in addition to his Indian counterpart, several other heads of government and state,” Pakistani foreign ministry spokesman Abdul Basit told reporters in the capital Islamabad.
Basit was speaking after being asked whether Gilani would meet Singh at the non-aligned movement summit scheduled to take place on July 15-16 in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
Next week’s meeting will be the second top-level meeting in less than a month after Singh and Zardari met in Russia on June 16 for the first time since Islamist gunmen killed 165 people in India’s financial capital.
A senior Indian foreign ministry source confirmed the Egypt meeting.
“Since the two prime ministers will be at the same place and at the same time they will meet and we can only say the talks will be a continuation of what transpired in Russia,” the source told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Pakistan’s foreign ministry spokesman said the planned meeting would be preceded by talks between the two countries’ foreign secretaries.
“Our two foreign secretaries will meet before the planned meeting between the two prime ministers,” he said, giving no dates for any of the meetings.
“We are going with an open mind and hope that the composite dialogue is resumed,” Basit added. “We are going to be meeting with a constructive and a positive mind.”
But analysts warned people not to get their hopes up too much, given the enormous challenges that both countries are facing and the spectre of Islamist violence, which Pakistan is battling to contain.
“The meeting itself is a plus point. We can (only) hope it will lead to a normalcy of relations,” said independent analyst Ikram Sehgal.
Singh, whose re-election was welcomed in Pakistan, said in June he wanted to try again to make peace with Pakistan, but stressed Islamabad needed to take “strong and effective” action to end terrorism.
After meeting Zardari on the sidelines of a summit in Yekaterinburg, he said that if Pakistani leaders show “courage, determination and statesmanship to take the high road to peace, India will meet it more than half the way.”
“I have spoken before also about my vision of a cooperative sub-continent and the vital interest people of the sub-continent have in peace. For this, we must try again to make peace with Pakistan,” he said.
New Delhi says Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) planned and launched the Mumbai assault, in which 10 gunmen targeted multiple locations in Mumbai during a three-day killing spree.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars since partition in 1947, two of them over the divided and disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.
—-Agencies