Pakistan, India to hold “comprehensive bilateral dialogue”: Sushma

Aziz said it was decided in the meeting with Swaraj to continue the constructive engagement between Pakistan and India.

The “comprehensive bilateral dialogue” will also include Confidence Building Measures (CBMs), Siachen, Sir Creek, Wullar Baragge/Tulbul Navigation Project, Economic and Commercial Cooperation, Counter-Terrorism, Narcotics Control, Humanitarian Issues, People-to-People exchanges and religious tourism.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will on Friday make a statement on her two-day visit to Pakistan in Parliament.

The foreign secretaries of the two countries will schedule further consultations on how best to meet and decide on the more operational specifics for this dialogue.

Swaraj is in Islamabad for a regional peace summit called the “Heart of Asia” conference, and is the most senior Indian official to visit Pakistan since Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi assumed office in May 2014.

The remarks offer a path to restart talks that have been repeatedly cancelled in the past two years due to increased fighting along their disputed border.

The South Asian nuclear neighbours, India and Pakistan, Wednesday agreed to talk on the issue of Jammu and Kashmir in their future parleys.

In a policy statement in the National Assembly, he said, it is too early to say when phase-two of the Murree peace talks between the Afghan government and Taliban would be initiated.

India is willing to join an Afghanistan-Pakistan transit agreement and create facilities at the border town of Attari to receive Afghan trucks coming through Pakistan, Sushma said.

The rapprochement is, importantly, based on a commitment by Pakistan that it would expedite the trial of Mumbai accused – a promise that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif also made during his visit to the White House in November, where he had pledged to take effective action against Lashkar-e-Taiba and its affiliates.

Aziz on December 7 had said that the deadlock in Indo-Pak ties had eased to some extent and the focus of the meeting would be on the resumption of the stalled composite dialogue process.

Said India’s former foreign secretary Lalit Mansingh: “We are in a new phase, but we have to look at what happens after this”.

Seven years after the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, India and Pakistan have agreed to resume structured dialogue between them.

Earlier, the lawmakers had criticised the government for agreeing on a joint statement which they said “favoured” India.

The effort was to unblock ties and move forward, the sources said.

However a recent thaw saw Swaraj visit Islamabad this week for a two-day regional conference that ended with a diplomatic breakthrough as both sides agreed to hold high-level peace talks.