Featured Image: Wagha Border Photo by Daniel Hauptstein via Wikimedia Commons
Pakistan High Commissioner to India, Abdul Basit has said Islamabad is ready to hold a dialogue with New Delhi on the sidelines of the Heart of Asia conference in Amritsar next week.
“The schedule of Foreign Affairs Adviser Sartaj Aziz is not cast in stone and if there was an offer for talks from the host nation, then it would be accepted by Pakistan,” Abdul Basit said in an interview with Indian TV Channel Aajtak on Monday.
The two South Asian neighbors have been locked a months-long standoff over Kashmir.
Underscoring the need for resumption of dialogue process between the two nuclear-armed countries, Basit said, “We can delay talks for months or even for years. But ultimately, a solution to the problems between India and Pakistan can only come through dialogue, and therefore, both nations must sit and discuss all the issues that confront them.”
The diplomat said, “escalation along the Line of Control is not in Pakistan’s as well as India’s interest.”
The Pakistan army currently is heavily deployed along the country’s western borders as part of the Operation Zarb-i-Azb and it is wrong to say that the escalation is being fuelled by Pakistan, he maintained.
“We would like that hostilities along the Line of Control (LoC) come to an end and that the 2003 ceasefire understanding is turned into a formal agreement between India and Pakistan,” Basit asserted.
Foreign Affairs adviser Sartaj Aziz recently confirmed that Pakistan will be attending the upcoming Heart of Asia conference scheduled to be held in India.
In September this year, India decided not to take part in South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) summit which was supposed to be held in Islamabad Pakistan.
While announcing Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to skip the conference, India’s external affairs ministry had said there were other countries that had expressed reservations about participating in the summit amid heightened tensions over terrorism.
