NEW DELHI: India’s Interior Minister Rajnath Singh would travel to Pakistan for a regional gathering but would not hold bilateral talks at a time when a surge of violence in India-held Kashmir has escalated the rivalry between the two nuclear-armed neighbors, officials said on Monday.
50 people have been killed and more than 6,000 wounded since protests erupted in the region after the Indian forces killed a Kashmiri freedom movement leader Burhan Wani last month. Wani, 22, was a commander of a freedom fighter group Hizbul Mujahideen. He had been declared a martyr by officials in Islamabad while India has branded him a “terrorist”.
India and Pakistan had fought three wars since independence two of which were over Kashmir. Singh would visit Islamabad on August 3 but would not separately meet with the Pakistani host of the meeting of interior ministers from the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).
A senior official from Indian interior ministry said in New Delhi, “Pakistan easily finds a reason to start violence in Kashmir and we don’t want to engage with them at this juncture.” Pakistan’s foreign ministry or the interior ministry had made no comment so far.
Wani’s death had revived freedom spirit of the Kashmiris. But violence and the absence of political engagement had also heightened restlessness between the two nations. Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said in May, “We are waiting for the day Kashmir becomes Pakistan.”
The rivalry between Pakistan and India had also hampered efforts to transform the upcoming SAARC conference into a meaningful platform for integration in South Asia, which accounts for a fifth of the world’s population but less than a tenth of its economic output.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a surprise stopover in Pakistan in December last year to meet PM Nawaz. It was a meeting that was seen as a refreshing gesture, but the thaw in bi-lateral relations was quickly offset by an attack on an Indian air base around the turn of the year which the New Delhi blamed on Pakistan just like it blamed the latest frictions on Kashmir.
