Talks and terror can't go together, Sushma tells Pak

Pakistan must stop exporting terror to India if it wants to restart the stalled bilateral dialogue, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said on Monday.

Even as the officials of the Coast Guard of India and its counterpart Pakistan Maritime Security Agency met in New Delhi for talks on Monday, the external affairs minister ruled out the possibility of an early restart of formal bilateral talks. She said New Delhi still remained firm on its stand that talks and terror could not go together.

Sushma told a news conference that New Delhi could hold talks with Islamabad even before the parliamentary elections in Pakistan, only if the latter stopped exporting terror to India and restrained its soldiers from flouting ceasefire along the Line of Control as well as the undisputed stretch of border between the two nations.

The formal dialogue between India and Pakistan had been suspended in January 2013 in the wake of the killing of two Indian army jawans by the soldiers of the neighbouring country near the LoC in Jammu and Kashmir.

A move to restart the engagement as Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue in December 2015 was aborted as it was followed by the attack on the Indian Air Force base at Pathankot in Punjab in January 2016. The attack was carried out by the Jaish-e-Mohammed, a terrorist outfit based in Pakistan.

Sushma on Monday said that the National Security Advisors of India and Pakistan continued to hold talks, as New Delhi had decided that while "talks and terror should not go together, talks on terror should go on".