India and Pakistan to restart peace talks

India and Pakistan have agreed to resume a broad-ranging peace process suspended after the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks mounted by Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar e-Taiba, which left 166 people dead.

The US has been pushing the nuclear-armed neighbours hard for more than a year to resume the talks. It hopes eased tensions along their border would free Pakistan to devote more resources to battling the Taliban – crucial for Washington’s strategy to stabilise Afghanistan.

New Delhi and Islamabad released simultaneous statements on Thursday saying they would “resume dialogue on all issues” including terrorism, the divided Muslim-majority province of Kashmir, peace and security, water disputes, economic and humanitarian issues and promoting cultural exchange.

Pakistan’s foreign minister will visit India before July to review the progress of the discussions.

The agreement is a significant softening of India’s position towards Islamabad compared with the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, when New Delhi insisted there could be no talks on outstanding issues until Pakistan brought the perpetrators of the attack – including the planners and trainers – to justice.

“This is a very pragmatic decision, a very well thought out decision,” Nirupama Rao, India’s foreign secretary, told an Indian television channel after the announcement. “India and Pakistan cannot afford to turn their backs to each other.”

A Pakistan foreign ministry official said: “Resumption of a broad peace process will give an impetus to normalised relations. The world doesn’t want two nuclear armed neighbours of the size of India and Pakistan to remain enemies.”

Uday Bhaskar, a retired commodore and former director of India’s Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis, said New Delhi’s decision reflected its concern about rising instability in Pakistan, which is increasingly being hit by terror attacks on its own soil.

“If my neighbour is going through this kind of internal deterioration in terms of its security, I think it’s very prudent I have contact with whoever is minding the store in Islamabad,” he said.

Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan have fought three wars and come to the brink of a fourth since independence from Britain in 1947 and the partition of the subcontinent.

From 2002 until 2006 the two countries engaged in intensive talks that led to the broad outlines of a potential settlement on the most bitterly contentious issue: the future of the divided province of Kashmir, which both sides claim as their own.

However, the talks petered out after Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s then president, was engulfed by domestic political turmoil that finally led to his ousting, and were formally cut off after the Mumbai attacks.

However, Brahama Chellaney, a professor of international studies at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, expressed scepticism that talks could now lead to any substantive result, given the weakness of Pakistan’s government vis-à-vis its powerful military and the tone of public opinion in India.

“The restart of the process in my view does not amount to much,” he said. “The challenge is that the two sides are not symmetrical. You have one side, which doesn’t run the foreign policy, and the other side, looking behind its shoulder at public opinion.”

In Pakistan, analysts warned, fresh discussions to resolve Indo-Pakistani disputes would offer militants an incentive to disrupt the process by launching another attack.

“India and Pakistan will have to show the maturity to stay on course, especially if there is another militancy-related big incident. This time there should be no break irrespective of whatever comes next,” said Mehmood Durrani, a retired major general and former national security adviser to Pakistan’s prime minister.

“While this announcement is a good step, India and Pakistan unfortunately have a history of having taken one step forward, two steps backward. We have to break away from that pattern.”