Shaukat Aziz

New Delhi, April 4: Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz is believed not to have raised the Kashmir issue in any serious manner during his 50-minute conversation with Manmohan Singh this morning.

Considering that Prime Minister Singh did not mention the word “terrorism” in his closing speech — though the Saarc Declaration mentions the need to combat it several times — both sides may have made a compact to play down the linkage.

Singh only said: “We must also win the war against all forms of extremism and intolerance in our region.”

At the end of the two-day summit, Saarc leaders did not agree with the Indian proposal for a regional mutual legal assistance treaty offering to exchange information on terrorists and criminals so that they could be pursued by the country to which they had fled.

Pakistan is said to have disagreed, saying such matters were better discussed bilaterally. Sri Lanka offered to host a meeting to discuss the idea, and then the matter was dropped.

At a news conference today, when foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee was asked about Aziz’s remarks the day before on Kashmir being the “key dispute, the core issue”, Mukherjee pointed out with some aplomb that “he was not very perturbed”.

The Pakistani foreign office press release, issued after the meeting between Aziz and Singh, said Aziz “underscored the importance of resolving Kashmir for durable peace and a brighter future of South Asia”.

But Indian sources said that unlike his public pronouncements yesterday, when Aziz had linked enhanced trade with a resolution of the Kashmir dispute, the “K” word was hardly raised in any meaningful manner in the meeting with Singh.

Today, though, Aziz, with some alacrity, offered to export cement to India. Both Prime Ministers discussed the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline and the need to open more bank branches in each other’s countries.

Clearly, the back channel conversation between the two countries seems to be going so well that Aziz, perhaps, needed to reiterate the importance of the Kashmir dispute publicly for his home audience and play it down in private conversations with the Indian leadership.

Mukherjee put his finger on the nub of the matter when he said: “On several occasions in the past, Pakistani authorities had declared that Kashmir is the core issue. To me that is nothing new. At the same time we have begun talks at several levels”.