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Vajpayee unlikely to visit Pakistan this year: Officials

P Jayaram

Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is unlikely to visit Pakistan this year in response to President Pervez Musharraf's invitation, but New Delhi is committed to maintaining continuity of the dialogue with Islamabad, officials said on Saturday.

"The visit (to Islamabad), if at all, will have to be after December as the prime minister has a busy diplomatic schedule ahead," a senior official of the Prime Minister's Office said.

But he said Vajpayee and Musharraf could meet at other venues, like on the margins of the UN General Assembly session in September, which both leaders are scheduled to attend, and the expected South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation summit in Kathmandu in December.

Musharraf's formal invitation to Vajpayee to visit Pakistan to pick up the threads of their Agra aummit on July 15-16 was delivered by Pakistan High Commissioner Ashraf Jehangir Qazi to Foreign Secretary Chokila Iyer on Friday.

"India is committed to continuing the dialogue with Pakistan because for normalisation of relations dialogue is the only way," the official said.

The official noted that apart from attending the UN General Assembly session, Vajpayee was also scheduled to pay a state visit to Russia in October and attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Australia in November.

Immediately after that Parliament would be meeting for a month-long session from the third week of November. Thus, a visit by Vajpayee to Islamabad this year could be virtually ruled out, the official said.

External affairs ministry officials said it was too early to say if External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh would be visiting Pakistan this year in response to the formal invitation from his Pakistani counterpart, Abdul Sattar, received a few days ago.

"We would like to hasten slowly in the light of the lessons learnt in Agra," a senior ministry official said on condition of anonymity.

Indian officials had charged Musharraf with adopting a 'unifocal' approach at the Agra summit by insisting that a settlement of the Kashmir dispute should precede all other efforts at normalisation of bilateral ties.

They said Musharraf's insistence in not having any structured agenda for the summit, despite Indian proposals for preparatory talks by officials ahead of the summit, had also led to the summit's failure to produce a joint declaration.

But despite the failure of the summit and Indian reservations of Musharraf's approach to the talks, Prime Minister Vajpayee has asserted that New Delhi would continue its bilateral engagement with Islamabad.

"We will continue to seek dialogue and reconciliation. We will persist with our efforts to convince Pakistan that our bilateral cooperation should not be held hostage to the resolution of any one issue."

"Though we could not conclude a joint document in Agra, we did achieve a degree of understanding. We will build on this to further increase the areas of agreement," Vajpayee said even as he asserted that India's concerns in vital areas, such as cross-border terrorism, would have to find a place in any document that future negotiations endeavour to conclude.

Indo-Asian News Service

Indo-Pak Summit 2001: The Complete Coverage

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