No reason to distrust Pak so early: Rajnath

Foreign Secretary Jaishankar and NSA Doval will take a final call on talks with Pakistan

There was no official word from New Delhi on Tuesday on whether Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar would travel to Islamabad on Friday for the India-Pakistan Foreign Secretary talks. But Home Minister Rajnath Singh said India had no reason to distrust Islamabad’s assurance that it would take action on inputs from India about the perpetrators of the Pathankot terror attack.

Sources said two key people who would have a say in the final call on the talks – Jaishankar and National Security Advisor Ajit Doval – were out of the country. Jaishankar was in Sri Lanka and Doval in Paris.

“The talks are on. The only question is whether these would take place on Friday or would be postponed,” a government source said. The source insisted that any decision to defer talks would not be unilateral but through mutual agreement of both governments.

India is also mulling providing more evidence to Pakistan on the terror attack. Islamabad had termed the evidence given by New Delhi until now as insufficient. It had demanded records of phone calls made by the terrorists to their handlers, who India claims are based in Pakistan, as well as fingerprints of the dead terrorists.

Pakistan maintains a comprehensive biometric database of its citizens. It has conveyed to India that it would run the fingerprints though the database. But Indian officials were skeptical that this would yield any results, given that Pakistan had always questioned the veracity of evidence given to it by New Delhi.