Farooq Abdullah, chief of the National Conference party that stormed into power in the recently concluded Jammu & Kashmir elections, made a strong pitch for the revival of ties between India and Pakistan, which has descended to its lowest ever since Independence.
The National Conference chief on Friday said that India should have good relations with all its neighbours, calling New Delhi the “elder brother” of neighbouring nations.
“It is not our job, it is the Centre’s job (to decide whether to initiate talks with Pakistan or not)…We want brotherhood. We should have good relations with all our neighbours,” Farooq Abdullah told news agency ANI.
Abdullah also said that India should revive the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc), which has been put in abeyance since 2017.
“I hope the Indian government will restart Saarc so that we can live happily. We are the elder brother of these countries,” Abdullah added.
In March this year, external affairs minister S Jaishankar had said that Saarc was in trouble because one of the members continued to undertake violent actions against other members, in an apparent reference to Pakistan which has notoriously been violating ceasefire agreements and staging infiltration along Indo-Pak border with help of its intelligence wing Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
Abdullah’s statement comes at a time when Jaishankar is set to visit Pakistan for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) meeting scheduled to take place on October 15 and 16.
Jaishankar’s visit to Islamabad will be the first by any foreign minister to Pakistan since his predecessor Sushma Swaraj travelled to the country for a multilateral event.
Swaraj, however, had an engagement with her counterpart and agreed to resume the dialogue process.
Jaishankar has made it clear that he had no such intentions, as he again accused Pakistan of sponsoring cross-border terrorism and of preventing the Saarc summit process from moving forward.