- Tuesday, November 26, 2024
A top American official made the remark on India-Pakistan ties two days after Pakistani PM Shehbaz Sharif offered to hold talks with India.
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE United States is in favour of direct dialogue between South Asian rivals India and Pakistan on issues of concern, a senior official of the Joe Biden administration has said.
India and Pakistan, which were separated at the time of their independence in August 1947, has witnessed continued strain in their ties on a number of issues, including Islamabad’s support to cross-border terror and the Kashmir problem.
India has maintained that it desires normal neighbourly relations with Pakistan while insisting that the onus is on Islamabad to create an environment that is free of terror and hostility for such an engagement.
New Delhi has also asserted that Jammu and Kashmir “was, is and will” always be part of the country.
“As we have long said, we support direct dialogue between India and Pakistan on issues of concern. That has long been our position,” state department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters on Wednesday (2) at his daily news conference in Washington.
Miller’s remarks came two days after Pakistani prime minister Shehbaz Sharif offered to hold talks with India to address all serious and outstanding issues.
Bilateral relations between Islamabad and New Delhi have been tense since August 2019 when India changed the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, which was turned into a Union Territory, administered by New Delhi.
On Ities with Pakistan, Indian external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has said that it is not possible for India to have normal relations with the neighbouring country until the policy of cross-border terrorism is abrogated.
“We can’t allow terrorism to be normalised; we can not allow that to become the basis for getting us into discussions with Pakistan. To me it is a fairly common sense proposition,” he said in June.
(With PTI inputs)
