| Date: |
15-07-2015 |
| Subject: |
India to go by Ufa statement, downplays remarks by Sartaz Aziz |
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NEW DELHI: India will engage with Pakistan on the basis of the joint statement issued after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's meeting with his counterpart at Ufa in Russia recently, people familiar with the matter said, dismissing subsequent hardening of stand by Pakistan's national security adviser Sartaj Aziz on the scope of bilateral dialogue.
Aziz had said at a press conference that any talk with India will have to place Kashmir at centre stage and that his country would continue to extend "moral, political and diplomatic support to our Kashmiri brethren".
Experts on both sides of the border said Aziz's remarks were directed at a section of his domestic constituency while Kashmir was not mentioned in the well-thought-out joint statement reached at Ufa.
Aziz's statement has "not in any way affected what was agreed upon" in Ufa and both sides will begin work on a meeting between their national security advisers, between the DG Border Security Force and the DG Pakistan Rangers, and between the two director generals of military operations.
"We have to judge on what they said to us," said one of the persons, who did not want to be identified.
The India-Pakistan joint statement "is an accurate reflection of the spirit" of the Modi-Sharif meeting in Ufa and the one-hour meeting was "about how to go about talking to each other in a high-level focused way", he said.
The statement was formulated by foreign secretary S Jaishankar and his Pak counterpart AA Chaudhary. It captures the main points of the meeting and "reasonably, accurately reflects the substance of the meeting", the person said. The statement was shown to Modi and NSA Ajit Doval before being read out to the media at Ufa, and likewise taken by the Pakistani foreign secretary to be approved by his higher-ups.
Source : economictimes.indiatimes.com
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