Rajnath Singh says possibility of any future NSA-level talks will depend on Islamabad

NEW DELHI: India’s engagement with Pakistan hangs in the balance, with Union home minister Rajnath Singh asserting that any possibility of a future dialogue now depends on the neighbouring country.

Less than 24 hours after Pakistan called off national security adviser-level talks, the government here put the ball back in its court. “It is for Pakistan to decide,” Singh said when asked about India’s course of action. It’s still early days to decide about a meeting between prime ministers Narendra Modi and Nawaz Sharif next month in New York, as envisaged earlier by both the countries.

The home minister, stressing that India wants dialogue and a cordial relationship with Pakistan, said the cancellation of talks was unfortunate. This was the first formal reaction since Pakistan called off the talks after New Delhi insisted on restricting the scope of the meeting to terror and dismissed the Hurriyat as stakeholders.



“Why didn’t Pakistan raise the Kashmir issue in Ufa in Russia when the two prime ministers met last month? Why was it not decided earlier that it would be part of the NSA-level talks? It was never an issue on the agenda,” Singh told reporters in Lucknow.

Asked about Pakistan blaming India for the cancellation of talks, the minister said: “It is Pakistan which has cancelled the talks and not India…Pakistan should not have deviated from the agenda decided during the Ufa meeting.”

With the international community including the US, China and Russia keen on a rapprochement between the South Asian neighbours, it is understood that New Delhi will undertake some deft diplomacy over the next few weeks to articulate its position on the botched initiative and explain the rationale behind its tough stand.

Meanwhile, the Congress on Sunday lashed out at the government’s handling of the talks and accused it of playing into Pakistan’s hands. “Unfortunately, the NDA government has played into Pakistan’s hands by being imprecise, by being unprepared, by lacking focus, by being ad hoc, by not doing sufficient hard-nosed groundwork, good old-fashioned diplomacy and preparation,” Congress spokesman AM Singhvi said.