Ajit Doval visits Pak Embassy to express grief on Peshawar School Attack

NEW DELHI: National Security Advisor Ajit Doval visited the Pakistan High Commission on Wednesday and offered his condolences following the Peshawar school attack that had left 141 dead. Doval’s visit follows a late night phone call by Narendra Modi to Nawaz Sharif where he said the Peshawar attack was not one against Pakistan but entire humanity.

“The whole of India is shocked and stunned to learn about this unbelievable carnage by terrorists.



No words are adequate to express our pain and agony on the killing of innocent school children,” Doval wrote in the condolence book at the Pakistan High Commission. Experts felt Doval’s visit and his short meeting with Pakistan High Commissioner Abdul Basit assumed significance in that usually foreign secretary or senior MEA officials are deputed for such goodwill gestures. Doval, a former director of Intelligence Bureau, reports directly to the PMO.

This was Doval’s maiden meeting with Basit since India had cancelled the secretary level talks. Doval was posted in the High Commission in Islamabad in the 1980s and is the key architect of India’s Af-Pak policy under the current dispensation.

Former Secretary (West) in MEA and ex-Ambassador to Afghanistan, Vivek Katju, however, refused to read much into NSA’s gesture beyond humanitarian move. “We stand by our neighbours in the hour of tragedy... But this gesture has no great significance as far as dialogue with Pakistan in concerned,” Katju stressed.

He pointed out that dialogue and encouragement to separatism cannot go hand-in-hand. “The visit of Pakistan Army Chief to Kabul on Wednesday to hunt down certain elements of Tehrike-Taliban Pakistan could show that their approach to fighting terror still remains segmented.”