Pak killing spirit of Ufa, says India

Stopping short of calling off the proposed National Security Adviser-level talks, New Delhi on Friday blamed Islamabad with trying to distort the understanding the two nations reached in Ufa in Russia last month.

Sources told Deccan Herald that while India did not want to call off the talks, it wanted to make it clear that the process of engagement could not move forward if Pakistan did not adhere to the terms set by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his counterpart Nawaz Sharif.

Modi’s meeting with Sharif on the sideline of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s summit at Ufa on July 10 saw both sides agreeing to a roadmap of engagement that would have commenced with the parleys between the National Security Advisers of the two countries.

Sharif’s Foreign Affairs and National Security Adviser Sartaj Aziz is expected to arrive in New Delhi on Saturday and is scheduled to meet his Indian counterpart Ajit Doval on Monday.

Islamabad, however, irked New Delhi by inviting leaders of Hurriyat Conference as well as other separatist leaders of Kashmir in the High Commission of Pakistan in New Delhi for a meeting with Aziz ahead of his parleys with Doval.

Past example
Modi government had strongly reacted to a similar invitation by Pakistan’s envoy to India to separatists in August 2014 and called off a proposed foreign secretaries meet.

New Delhi said that it saw a pattern in “Pakistan’s actions after the Ufa summit” and the position Islamabad took on Friday was “a culmination of that approach”. “Instead, we saw a sharp increase in the unprovoked firings from the Pakistani side and some serious cross border terrorist incidents. The last one, at Udhampur, resulted in the capture alive of a Pakistani national, a matter that would have naturally come up in the NSA level talks on terrorism, to Pakistan's discomfort,” said Swarup.

New Delhi also indicated that Pakistan Army and Rangers deliberately escalated tension along the Line of Control as well as the undisputed stretch of the border.