New Delhi: Pakistan's foreign secretary will visit New Delhi on Tuesday for the first time since the Narendra Modi government came to power, with the two countries using the tried and tested platform of a multilateral event to resurrect stalled peace talks.
Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry will meet foreign secretary S. Jaishankar in the afternoon on the margins of the Heart of Asia conference on Afghanistan's future at Hyderabad House, senior officials from both nations confirmed. Chaudhry will arrive in New Delhi in the morning and fly back at night.
The foreign secretaries were to meet on January 15 to draw up a road map for multiple simultaneous bilateral negotiations under a comprehensive dialogue the two nations had declared when foreign minister Sushma Swaraj visited Islamabad in December.
But the January 2 Pathankot terrorist attack forced the countries to postpone the foreign secretaries' meeting. The top diplomats of the two nations have not met since then, even when they were together in Pokhara last month for a South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) conclave.
"Foreign secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry will lead Pakistan's delegation to this meeting," Pakistan's foreign ministry said in a statement on Monday, referring to the Heart of Asia talks. "Pakistan delegation will also hold bilateral meetings with other leading delegations attending the meeting."
Jaishankar and Chaudhry are expected to discuss the investigations into the Pathankot case, and the possibility of reviving the agenda they were to take up in January. But neither Indian nor Pakistani officials were willing to conjecture on the meeting's outcomes.
The officials did concede, though, the urgency felt by both sides for a meeting amid increasing signals that a peace process launched personally by Prime Ministers Modi and Nawaz Sharif was falling off the rails irretrievably, and embarrassingly.
Although India allowed a joint investigation team from Pakistan to visit the Pathankot airbase in Punjab, Islamabad has since indicated reluctance to allow a reciprocal visit by the National Investigation Agency (NIA).
The NIA is keen to question members of the Jaish-e-Mohammed, an internationally recognised terrorist group. India is convinced that Jaish was behind the Pathankot attack.
Earlier this month, Pakistani high commissioner Abdul Basit had said that bilateral talks between the two sides stood "suspended", his comment coming amid a row over Pakistan arresting an alleged Indian spy from its border with Iran.
Pakistan claims that former navy officer Kulbhushan Yadav has confessed to working for the Research and Analysis Wing, India's external espionage agency. India has denied any link between Yadav and the government and insisted that he was working in Iran as a private businessman.#Since Basit's statement, national security adviser Ajit Doval has spoken at least twice on the telephone with his Pakistani counterpart, Nasser Khan Janjua, senior officials said.
India's foreign ministry is convinced that Basit's comments represent a sentiment in Pakistan's powerful military establishment that India has been dictating the pace and direction of the peace talks.
But the foreign office also senses an internal tussle within Pakistan, between the Sharif government in Islamabad and the army headquarters in Rawalpindi.
Pakistan's foreign ministry has repeatedly insisted over the past fortnight that the "door" for talks was still open and that Basit had been misunderstood.
"The hype created by the Indian media over Mr Basit's remarks was neither warranted nor required," Pakistan's foreign ministry spokesperson, Mohammed Nafees Zakaria, said last week. "Pakistan will be ready to talk when India is ready."
Indian foreign ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup too insisted last week that the dialogue with Pakistan was "certainly not suspended".The decision to meet on the margins of a multilateral event allows both sides to underplay the hype that invariably surrounds an India-Pakistan dialogue, and represents a continuation of a strategy the two countries have frequently used in the past.
Modi had used Sharif's presence amid a galaxy of South Asian leaders at his inauguration to kick-start his Pakistan policy.
When the policy appeared headed nowhere in early 2015, Modi sent Jaishankar on a yatra to Islamabad and other South Asian capitals. It paved the way for a decision to hold a meeting between the two countries' national security advisers last August in New Delhi.
That meeting was called off amid bickering over the agenda, but when Modi wanted to revive peace talks, he again chose a multilateral platform - the Paris climate change conclave last December - to meet Sharif.
The Paris meeting led to regular communication between the national security advisers, which has survived the subsequent upheavals in ties.