India and Pakistan have decided to revive
the stalled dialogue as Prime Minister Narendra Modi accepted his
Pakistan counterpart Nawaz Sharif's invitation to visit Pakistan in 2016
for the SAARC summit.
In their first
bilateral talks in over a year, the two leaders met for nearly an hour
in Ufa's Congress Hall on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation
Organisation (SCO) summit and decided that National Security Advisers of
India and Pakistan, Ajit Doval and Sartaj Aziz, will meet in New Delhi
either next month or in September to discuss all issues connected to
terrorism.
The two leaders focused their discussions
mainly on terrorism, which India has been projecting as the core issue
in Indo-Pakistani relations.
The two leaders came face-to-face in Kathmandu in November last for the SAARC summit but only exchanged pleasantries.
Foreign
secretaries of the two countries were to meet in August last year in
Islamabad but the talks were cancelled by India which protested the
Pakistani envoy in Delhi meeting Kashmiri separatist leaders ahead of
the parleys.
A decision has also been
taken for early meetings of BSF Director General and his counterpart
from Pakistan Rangers followed by that of DGMOs. Modi, who accepted
Sharif's invitation to visit Pakistan for the SAARC summit in 2016, will
be the first Indian Prime Minister in 12 years to travel to that
country after the then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's historic
visit in January 2004.
The two leaders agreed that India and Pakistan have collective responsibility to ensure peace and promote development.
A one-page joint statement outlining a
five-point roadmap issued after the Modi-Sharif meeting said, both sides
agreed to discuss ways and means to expedite the Mumbai case trial (in
Pakistan), including additional information like providing voice
samples.
In the joint statement, India
and Pakistan also decided to release fishermen in each other's custody,
along with their boats, within a period of 15 days, addressing one of
the major humanitarian issues between them.
According
to the latest list exchanged by the two sides, there were 355 Indian
fishermen languishing in Pakistani jails and 27 Pakistani fishermen
lodged in Indian jails.
The two sides also decided to have a mechanism for facilitating religious tourism
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