India ready for talks on everything: Natwar

After getting Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz to admit that the plan for joint sovereignty for Kashmir mooted by Gen Pervez Musharraf was just an "informal proposal meant for internal public debate", India today decided to be gracious to Pakistan and said it was prepared to talk about "everything".

The tone sounded by Foreign Minister K Natwar Singh, who held a press conference to enumerate the foreign policy achievements of six months of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, was mellow today where India's position was sharp and on the verge of combative yesterday.

As he wound up his India visit yesterday, because Aziz continued to insist on the centrality of the Kashmir issue and linked progress on that to progress on everything else, India too said negotiations on the petroleum pipeline could only go forward if India got a package of economic concessions in the broad rubric of economic policy including the "most favoured nation" treatment.

Earlier, so insignificant was the issue of MFN for India that Commerce Minister Kamal Nath did not even raise it in his meeting with Aziz.

That Petroleum Minister Manishankar Aiyar decided to make it a trade-off item with the pipeline, suggested that India was letting Pakistan know that a unifocal approach "" Kashmir first, then everything else"" would not work.

However, after Aziz had acknowledged publicly that the suggestion on Kashmir was just a balloon sent up by Musharraf to test domestic waters, today Natwar Singh sought to reassure not just Islamabad, but the rest of the world that the dialogue with Pakistan would endure.

Natwar Singh accepted candidly that in the last five or eight days, after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's speech in Srinagar, there was a widespread feeling in Pakistan that the "train had got off the rails".

However, in his talks with Aziz, the Prime Minister, he said had explained that there was no difference between what he had told Musharraf in New York and what he had said in Srinagar. "Singh told Aziaz that if there is any misunderstanding, we want to remove it". Natwar Singh said.

He said the overall effect of the Aziz visit was that normalisation of ties between India and Pakistan were moving forward.

Pakistan is now reported to be of the view that there should be buses not just between Muzaffarabad and Srinagar and links between Munabao and Khokh-rapar but other points as well was forward movement in the banking sector, he said

Natwar Singh said the expectation that the Congress government would not take the normalisation process forward had not proved correct. From 1996 to 2000, Indo-Pak relations followed an erratic course, with Lahore followed by the Kargil war, followed by Operation Parakram. "We kept telling the Vajpayee government, don't shut the door on diplomacy" he said.

He said in six months, his government had made significant progress on relations with the US, Iraq and had managed to bring India within the ambit of the most realistic contenders for the permanent membership of the UN Security Council.