Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan on Friday blamed the ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) for the continued suspension of a formal dialogue between his nation and India.
“We can tell India that we (Pakistan) have been waiting for a long time to coexist as civilised neighbours...but what to do? The ideology of (the) RSS has come in between,” Khan said in Tashkent when a journalist asked him about the possibility of talks between New Delhi and Islamabad.
He had attacked the RSS – the mentor of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – earlier too. “While the Nazis hate was directed at the Jews, the RSS directs it towards the Muslims and to a lesser extent towards the Christians. They believe that India is exclusive for Hindus and others are not equal citizens,” the Prime Minister of Pakistan had said at the United Nations General Assembly in September last year.
The Indian Army and the Pakistan Army on February 25 agreed to stop firing at each other across the Line of Control (LoC) and strictly adhere to the 2003 ceasefire agreement – fuelling speculation about the possibility of resumption of the bilateral dialogue, which remained suspended since 2013.
India and Pakistan also had back-channel talks for restarting the stalled dialogue, with the top brass of the intelligence agencies of the two nations holding several rounds of informal talks in the United Arab Emirates over the past few months.
New Delhi, however, neither officially confirmed nor denied the reports about its back-channel talks with Islamabad.
What, however, apparently stalled the process is Khan’s public stand that Pakistan could restart formal talks with India only when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government in New Delhi would roll back its August 5, 2019 move to strip Jammu and Kashmir of its special status and to reorganize the state into two Union Territories. New Delhi strongly rejected the Khan government’s demand, underlining that the decision on J&K was an internal affair of India and endorsed by the Parliament of India.
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