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WITH a long hang around, Pakistan and India are eventually initiating talks at the Foreign Secretaries’ level in New Delhi with effect from today—Sunday. Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary Riaz Khokhar has reached the Indian capital for the dialogue. Prior to his departure for New Delhi, Khokhar said that Kashmir issue and nuclear CBMs will be taken up during the two-day Pak-India parleys.

Going by the index of the history, the reality manifests that the two countries have undeniably come a long way to initiate dialogue on Kashmir and other outstanding issues.

Yet simultaneously, it’s a matter of record that Pakistan had persistently striven for resumption of the stalled dialogue between the two countries. President Musharraf had time and again offered to enter into dialogue with India anywhere, at any time and at any level.

It was a paradoxical scenario wherein the Indian belligerence had impeded the effort for normalization of their relations between the two nuke neighbors. Nonetheless, it’s cheering and by all perceptions soothing that the dialogue process is being started now as an upshot of the pledge, given by the ex-Prime Minister of India ABVajpayee’s which ensures to address Kashmir and other issues. Vajpayee beamed this commitment via a joint statement, which was issued after talks with President Musharraf on the sidelines of SAARC summit in January this year.

What’s very important, nevertheless, is that the talks should be held with sincerity and seriousness to achieve the tangible results. Pakistan is entering the dialogue with sincerity and earnestness. It’s hoped that the Indian side will also reciprocate—in an identical style and lead the talks to the logical conclusion to usher in an era of peace, progress, prosperity plus affluence and security in South Asia.

As every pragmatic soul acknowledges, the comity of nations is earnestly watching the dialogue process and want the two countries to address their contentious issues for serenity and safety of the South Asian region.

It must, by all means, be borne in mind that Kashmir is the core issue and a major source of tension, confrontation and conflict between the two countries. It will be futile to expect that durable peace can be established without resolving this issue. At the same time, it’s vital that the Indian government makes evaporate or at least scales down the enormity of its brutalization of the Kashmiri people in the forcibly held-part of the Himalayan State—IHK at-once.

The innocent Kashmiris have endured neurotic and obsessed oppression and repression over the past decades. There is hardly any doubt that the Kashmiris want freedom from the Indian control—which is illicit by all parameters and norms of justice and candor.

Not to talk of those who got displaced and were made homeless, in millions in 1947-48 by the axis of evils—with the last Dogra ruler of the Jammu & Kashmir State, Hari Singh—atop, the people of the State also sacrificed over 80,000 precious and lovely lives during the freedom struggle—explicitly for the sake of emancipation from the Indian yoke.

As India fully understands that the global settings have changed with the convergence of the Orb into a global village wherein no nation can be placed in bondage against its aspirations, it is an apposite time for New Delhi to accept these ground realities. India should, as a result, pursue the dialogue with Pakistan without inhibitions and—instead strive to resolve the Kashmir issue, which has stigmatized its face due to its forces’ livid violation of human rights—which can, in no way be tolerated—any more.

Any deviation from such a course would not only continue to pose perils to peace in South Asia but would eventually make all accomplishments—made so far through the CBMs—absolutely pointless. New Delhi has to accept that there can not be any friendship between India and Pakistan—in any arena, whatsoever it may be sans the solution of the Kashmir dispute and that too—reflecting the aspires of the bona fide owners of the charismatic State, a realm—acknowledged worldwide—as Paradise on Earth. Let there be no boo-boo, blunder or mix-up on the actuality and truth—in any way.

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