Jaishree Balasubramanian in Jakarta
Taking the Indo-Pak peace process further, External Affairs Minister K Natwar Singh held talks in Jakarta on Friday with his Pakistani counterpart Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri for the second time in less than a fortnight.
"We have taken it further here, we will take it further in Islamabad and then when he (Kasuri) comes to New Delhi in August," Singh told reporters after their talks lasting over 10 minutes on the sidelines of the ARF meeting.
"We continued the discussions that we had in China (on June 21). The Foreign Minister and I will meet again in two weeks time and I have requested him to come to Delhi in August. We will carry this further," he said.
Asked if he was optimistic about the peace process after today's talks, Singh said, "I don't term it as optimistic or pessimistic. One has to be realistic."
Kasuri said Pakistan had the political will to carry forward the peace process. "I feel that given the political will even difficult issues can be resolved... for us to have durable peace, we need to involve the people of Kashmir" to resolve the issue.
Terming his talks with Singh as "good", Kasuri said the two sides had excellent meeting in China. The foreign secretaries of both countries too had successful talks. "That shows the trend of the discussions."
While maintaining that the real issue between the two countries was Kashmir, Kasuri said India and Pakistan should try to resolve their problems peacefully as too much was at stake with both being nuclear powers.
He said he was "optimistic" by temperament. "Basically you cannot make significant progress in one meeting but the fact that we did develop a level of trust is helpful," Kasuri said.
"Because when you have issues of the nature that we have between Pakistan and India, issues that have defied solutions for 57 years as has the issue of Jammu and Kashmir, you can't expect to reach a solution in one or two meetings. So as long as you continue to build trust that's what's important," he said.
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