Foreign Secretary Rao was not invited to visit: Pak media

A report by Pakistani daily The News, on the bilateral talks in New Delhi on Thursday has claimed that Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao was not invited to Pakistan by her counterpart Salman Bashir.

This will be an additional embarrassment for the Indian government over the foreign secretary-level talks that have gone sour.

At a press conference held after the talks, Rao was asked specifically, "Have you been invited to Pakistan?"

She had responded with a smile, "My counterpart has said that he would like me to visit Pakistan."

But The News reported, "When asked whether he (Bashir) had invited Rao to Islamabad for talks, he said there was no such proposal."

At a media conference at the Pakistan high commission in New Delhi on Thursday, Bashir said, '"Pakistan has given some suggestions and India has also submitted proposals during the meeting, but I told them that Pakistan wanted result-oriented and meaningful dialogue with India."

There is no need for secretary-level talks if India remains stuck to its stand on outstanding issues, Bashir added, the paper reported.

Commenting on the talks, The News reported, "No substantial progress was made during the talks as India engaged in a game of doubletalk, saying one thing while meaning the other."

It also quoted Bashir as saying, "The gap between Pakistan and India was widening" and 'he did not see any substantial progress in the talks'.

The Pakistani media on Friday claimed that the foreign secretary-level talks failed to yield any substantial results, and are being seen as a failure on part of the Pakistani diplomacy in that country.

"Pakistan has failed to achieve the goals of time-and-result-oriented dialogue, the revival of the composite peace process and the resumption of talks from the pre-Mumbai attacks status. It has also failed to hand over a dossier listing evidence of Indian involvement in the Tribal Areas. While the country's diplomats brought up the distribution of water, they failed to move India," The Daily Times quoted an official as saying.

Although the talks ended without any 'breakthrough', there were no 'breakaway' either, as both countries have agreed to remain in 'touch' in future also, he said.

There were no joint press conference neither any joint statement issued after the meeting between Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao and her Pakistani counterpart Salman Bashir, which indicates that the vacuum between the two nuclear power countries is so large that it can not vanish in just a single table talk, the official told the paper.

Pakistani diplomats believed that a joint statement would have ensured that both India and Pakistan are really eager to resolve issues that have been lingering for decades between them.

"We had hoped that a joint statement would be issued to ... show that the two sides are set, in earnest, to tackle their issues," The Daily Times quoted a senior official as saying.

'Meaningless talks end in meaningless way', screamed a headline in a Pakistani newspaper on the first officials' talks with India  in 14 months, with the media saying that the dialogue had failed to end the freeze, and counselled Islamabad to refuse further such overtures.

But a section of the newspapers saw the talks as a good start, saying a meeting between two foreign secretaries should bring cheer to those seeking the normalisation of ties. Leading this line was the influential paper The Dawn, which said the key to the way forward was to devise a workable framework for the two sides to resolve their disputes as the present climate is nowhere close to achieving that goal.

Proclaiming that the Kashmir issue remains a core dispute, it said small beginnings should be embraced wholeheartedly.

It said the Pakistani concerns were over water and India's cold start military doctrine. Referring to the 'blame game' indulged in by both sides, the editorial said India must realise that it cannot keep ties with Pakistan "hostage to incidents of terrorism".

At the same time, Pakistan "must realise that pretending it can be business as usual and as though recent incidents of serious violence ought to have no bearing on how ties between the two countries are affected must be discarded", said the paper.

Both countries must realise that the "other remains a millstone around its neck: progress for either without peace with the other is not ultimately possible, and everything must be done to achieve it", The Dawn said in the editorial.

Additional inputs from PTI