NEW DELHI: India on Thursday denied sending any messages asking Pakistan to start a dialogue, rejecting claims made by the Pakistani prime minister's special assistant on national security in an interview this week that New Delhi had reached out to Islamabad for talks.
Ties between Pakistan and India have been particularly tense since August last year when New Delhi revoked the special autonomy of the disputed Kashmir region it governs. The Muslim-majority territory has been the site of decades of hostility between nuclear arch-rivals India and Pakistan, who both claim the region in full but rule in part.
In an interview with Indian journalist Karan Thapar which was aired on Tuesday, the Pakistani premier's aide, Dr. Moeed Yusuf, said that in the past year his government had received from New Delhi the messages about a desire for conversation.
“As regards the purported message let me make it clear that no such message was sent from our side,” India's ministry of external affairs spokesman, Anurag Srivastva, told reporters ]on Thursday.
“The Pakistani leadership continues to indulge in inappropriate, provocative and hate speech against India,” he added. “Such support to terrorism against India and use of derogatory and abusive language are not conducive to normal neighborly relations.”
In Tuesday's interview, Yusuf outlined pre-conditions necessary for dialogue, including that New Delhi would release all political prisoners in Kashmir, lift “military siege” in the area and stop all human rights violations against Kashmiris.
He said India’s move to scrap the special autonomous status of Kashmir was “not an internal matter" but a “matter for the UN." The people of Kashmir, he added, must be a third party to any negotiations between the two South Asian nuclear-armed countries.
India, however, considers Kashmir its domestic issue and Yusuf's words an attempt to divert the Pakistani public's attention from their own government's failures.
"The official is well advised to restrict his advice to his establishment and not to comment on India’s domestic policy,” the Indian foreign office spokesperson said. “The statements made by him are contrary to facts on the ground, misleading and fictitious.”
Political analysts fear the India-Pakistan relationship may deteriorate further and affect the whole region.
“The future of South Asia is completely dependent on the future of India-Pakistan relations and India-China relations," Mumbai-based activist and columnist Sudheendra Kulkarni told Arab News. "Unless you find a peaceful solution to the disputes that we have with Pakistan on the one hand and China on the other, South Asia will remain a zone of conflict, and the zone of conflict will never achieve its full potential for progress and prosperity."
Vijayan MJ of the Pakistan-India Peoples' Forum for Peace and Democracy, a civil society platform, blamed India for worsening bilateral ties by not responding to peace gestures by the Pakistani leadership, and making matters worse through its "illegal abrogation" of Article 370 of the constitution, which granted autonomy to Kashmir.
Kashmiri experts are skeptical about the success of talks between India and Pakistan, especially in furthering its cause.
"Nor does it seem that talks, if indeed they are held, will yield anything by the mood we witness in the interview,” Srinagar-based political analyst Prof. Siddiq Wahid said in reference to the Pakistani premier's aide Tuesday media appearance.
He added: “I believe it is up to us in the Jammu and Kashmir state to create a trajectory towards a resolution that is acceptable to all the parties to the dispute. I appeal to the international community to support it. Seventy-three years is long enough to wait for the two countries."
"From a Kashmir perspective, it seems we have both India and Pakistan, who are unable to leap into the present and future.”
