PM to meet Zardari today

For the first time since the terror attacks in Mumbai last November, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will meet Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari tomorrow. Starting this evening, he is also meeting Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev in a busy 24 hours.

The meetings will be in Yekaterinburg, in the cool climes of the Ural mountains in Russia, but Singh is expected to turn the heat on Zardari in their 30-minute interaction.

The Indian side’s focus will firmly be on what Pakistan can do to curb terrorism against India. Indian government officials say whatever Pakistan has done so far is inadequate.

The two leaders have managed to take time out for this meeting despite a schedule packed with two bilateral summits — that of the four BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the regional security bloc in which India has ‘observer’ status.

The request for the meeting came from the Pakistan High Commissioner to India, Shahid Malik, who spoke to Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon about it last week. Since last December, Pakistan had been asking for a composite dialogue.

The last time Singh and Zardari met was in New York in September 2008 on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

The Prime Minister had given enough indication that another meeting could be in the offing when he replied to the debate on the President’s address in Parliament. Delineating his “vision” for a “transformed” South Asia, which would move from poverty to prosperity with the cooperation of all neighbours, Singh had said: “I sincerely believe it is in our vital interest therefore to try again to make peace with Pakistan… If the leaders of Pakistan have the courage, determination and statesmanship to take this road to peace, I wish to assure them that we will meet them more than half way.”

However, tomorrow’s meeting cannot be taken as a resumption of the peace dialogue between the two countries, which had been suspended after the Mumbai attacks though India did not stop trains, buses and flights to Pakistan.

“There is only one reason why our relationship is under stress,” said an official. “We expect credible action from Pakistan. The Prime Minister will describe our expectations when he meets the Pakistani president… This is a meeting, not a (resumption of) dialogue or process.” The release of Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Saeed, a prime accused in the Mumbai attacks, may well crop up. India believes that Pakistan is taking refuge in legalese. “Our position is not only principled, but also correct. There is no reason why we should be shy of expressing it before anyone, including the Pakistani president,” said the official.