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THIMPHU: The India-Pakistan foreign secretary
level dialogue got underway late on Sunday night
with the two sides treading cautiously over
contentious issues including the Samjhauta
blast case.
While Pakistani
foreign secretary Salman
Bashir,
going into the talks, said that Pakistan wanted
to discuss all issues and not just Samjhauta, his
counterpart Nirupama
Rao reiterated
that the talks were going to be exploratory in
nature.
While the talks were
earlier tentatively scheduled for Sunday afternoon,
the dialogue could start only around 9.15pm local
time as both sides remained occupied with their
commitments throughout the day in the ongoing Saarc
ministerial conference. The two officials met
eventually in the Taj Tashi hotel where officials
from both the countries are staying.
Both foreign
secretaries were accompanied by five officials each
when they walked into the hall where the meeting was
held. Officials accompanying the two foreign
secretaries remained non-committal about the outcome
but Indian officials said they had "reasonable
expectations" even though, as they stated, they had
learnt to "expect the unexpected" from Pakistan.
"Dialogue between India and
Pakistan is a must if we are to satisfactorily
resolve the outstanding issues between our two
countries. We have a number of outstanding issues
and so we are going into this with an open mind and
constructive attitude. I believe my Pakistani
counterpart will also have a number of ideas to
discuss and so this is going to be an exploratory
discussion," Rao said just ahead of the meeting.
Sources said the dialogue
process actually started on Saturday with Rao and
Bashir meeting "informally" late in the night. An
official described it as a precursor meeting ahead
of the talks. "Because they were in the same hotel,
it was decided that they should meet," he said.
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