YEKATERINBURG, Russia: Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met with Pakistan’s president yesterday for the first time since last year’s deadly terrorist attacks on Mumbai, and told him Pakistan must prevent its territory from being used to launch such attacks, officials and news reports said.
In the first sign of a thaw since the freeze in ties that followed the Mumbai terror attacks, leaders of India and Pakistan agreed to a meeting between their foreign secretaries before July 15 that will be focused solely on resolving the “primary issue of terrorism” that has strained their relations.
Meeting for the first time after the Nov. 26 Mumbai attacks that has been established as being the handiwork of Pakistan-based terrorists, the two leaders shook hands and smiled before television cameras. But even before they could sit down, Singh told Zardari that India’s concerns over terrorism must be addressed if they were to progress.
“Excellency, I am pleased to meet you. But I have a limited mandate to tell you that the Pakistani territory can’t be used for acts of terror against India,” Singh told Zardari in the meeting that was organized on the sidelines of the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that both leaders are attending as observers.
Zardari looked slightly flustered, but soon the two leaders settled down for one-one-one talks in the Silver Room of Hotel Hyatt Regency in the Russian city located on crossroads of Europe and Asia.
“My mandate is to tell you that Pakistani territory should not be used for terrorism against India,” Indian and Russian news agencies quoted Singh as saying after shaking hands with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari ahead of their meeting behind closed doors.
The leaders of South Asia’s nuclear-armed neighbors met on the sidelines of summits in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg, Russian officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to announce the information on the record.
India accuses a Pakistan-based militant group of sending the teams of gunmen that rampaged through Mumbai, India’s financial center, in a three-day siege that killed 179 people.
Pakistani officials have acknowledged the November attacks were partly plotted on their soil. Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmoud Qureshi downplayed Singh’s reported remark and said the meeting itself was a positive development, the reports said.
“I think the very fact that the two leaders are meeting at this summit for the first time since the tragic incident in Mumbai is positive,” Russia’s RIA-Novosti and ITAR-Tass quoted Qureshi as saying in Yekaterinburg.
In a speech to India’s Parliament last week, Singh said that “it is in our vital interest therefore to try again to make peace with Pakistan” and urged Pakistan to take “strong, effective and sustained action” to prevent the use of its territory for terror.
