NEW DELHI, 26 May 2006 — India and Pakistan began two-day talks yesterday on a maritime dispute over Sir Creek, a coastal strip that links India’s Gujarat state with Pakistan’s Sindh province, on a positive note officials said.
This despite the fact that the week having begun on a negative note with the Indo-Pak talks on demilitarization of Siachen Glacier making no headway.
Indian and Pakistani officials met for the ninth round of technical-level talks on the issue in New Delhi, a Foreign Ministry official said. India’s Surveyor General M. Gopal Rao and Pakistan’s Additional Secretary, Defense, Adm. Ahsan-ul-Haq Chaudhri were leading the delegations in the discussions.
Discussions on Sir Creek are part of the third round of composite dialogue between India and Pakistan launched here early this year after talks between Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran and his Pakistani counterpart Riaz Mohammad Kahn.
With Sir Creek a narrow strip of marshland on India’s western border, resolving differences over it is expected to help fishermen of both countries who inadvertently cross over to the other side and suffer in jail for years.
The last round of talks to demarcate Sir Creek last year had failed to formulate terms of reference for a joint survey on the coastal border, as both sides differed on the extent of area to be surveyed.
In early 2005, both countries had decided that a new joint survey of Sir Creek would be conducted and used as the basis for negotiations to demarcate the border.
Both sides have been using documents that date back to 1914 to survey the marshland, which is believed to have shifted considerably since.
Sir Creek, is the only maritime dispute between India and Pakistan. The dispute dates back to 1947, when India won its freedom from British rule and Pakistan was created as a separate nation.
The talks are likely to end on a positive note, sources said. “Both sides have discussed the joint survey conducted last year and are hopeful of the resolution of the issue,” a source added. Some differences remain regarding the issue of treating the settlement of maritime boundary and the land boundary demarcation in the Sir Creek area as interlinked or separately and this needs to be resolved, sources said.
Meanwhile, the meeting between ministers of India, Pakistan and Iran on the over 7 billion dollar tri-nation gas pipeline project has been postponed by at least a month. The three ministers were to meet in Tehran next month to finalize modalities for implementation of the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline project. The meeting will now be held in July-August, official sources said.
— With input from agencies
