New Delhi: In a move that could signal the beginning of a thaw in India-Pakistan relations after a year of bitter acrimony, India has accepted an invitation to attend the next meeting of the Permanent Indus Commission (PIC) to be held in Lahore in March.
A person familiar with the development in the Indian government said on Friday that the Indian commissioner on the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT)—reached between the two countries in 1960 and brokered by the World Bank—would travel to Pakistan for the talks.
The story was first reported by The Hindu on Friday.
The meeting between the two Indus commissioners “does not amount to a resumption of or start of a formal dialogue between the two countries”, the person cited above added.
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India has repeatedly asked Pakistan to end its support to terrorism before peace talks take place between the two countries on a series of disputes, including sovereignty over the disputed region of Kashmir.
Though there have been sporadic attacks in Kashmir, there have been no major strikes in India since the Nagrota attack in November when terrorists targeted the residential quarters of an army garrison. In January, Pakistan put the chief of the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba, Hafiz Saeed, in detention and later restricted his movements and access to media. Saeed is accused by India of plotting the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai in 2008 in which 166 people were killed over a span of three days.
It is unclear why Pakistan detained Saeed in January—with a Pakistani court having set him free for the lack of evidence after a brief detention for the 2008 Mumbai attack in 2009 due to international pressure.
Talks at the level of commissioners have taken place more than 110 times since 1960—when the IWT was concluded—with the two officials meeting sometimes twice a year alternately in India and Pakistan.
India had signalled its intention to review the IWT in September after a terrorist ambush attack on an army garrison in Uri in Kashmir killed 19 soldiers.
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“Blood and water cannot flow together,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi had been quoted as saying at a meeting he chaired on the sharing of the water of river Indus on 27 September in response to the Uri attack.
While outlining plans for the full exploitation of India’s share of the Indus water—the use of water of the three rivers to irrigate 912,000 acres of land up from 800,000 acres at present and exploiting the hydroelectric power potential of the three eastern rivers, estimated to be 18,600MW—senior officials of the government had then also said that the two Indus water commissioners will now meet “only in an atmosphere free of terror”.
A previous thaw between the neighbours in late 2015 resulted in Indian foreign minister Sushma Swaraj visiting Pakistan in December 2015 for a regional conference on Afghanistan and Modi himself making an announced visit to Lahore to wish prime minister Nawaz Sharif for his birthday on his way back from a visit to Russia.
The foreign secretaries of the two countries were to meet on 15 January 2016 to draw up a roadmap for engagement between the two countries. But a terrorist attack on an airforce station in Pathankot on 2 January put paid to that. And subsequent terrorist raids on Uri and later on Nagrota in November crushed any chances of resumption of dialogue.
Pakistan’s attempts to internationalise a wave of protests in Indian-administered Kashmir, denying India access to a suspected Indian spy allegedly arrested in Pakistan’s troubled Balochistan and public sparring between ministers at fora like the United Nations General Assembly only made matters worse.
The IWT lays down the framework for sharing water from the Beas, Ravi, Sutlej, Indus, Chenab and Jhelum rivers. It specifies that water from the three western rivers—Indus, Jhelum and Chenab—are reserved for Pakistan, while those from the three eastern rivers—Ravi, Sutlej and Beas—are for India.
