Let’s talk about talks first: Sinha

* Jaswant rejects Kashmir mediation
* Vajpayee welcomes prisoners release

NEW DELHI: Indian Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha on Monday said India would try and resolve all outstanding issues with Pakistan in its “third and final” bid at peace.

“We will have to try, we will have to talk about talks first. We will have to find out what exactly, in what manner, what issues and in what priority,” Sinha told BBC’s Asia Today programme.

On why and India’s position on talks changed, he said: “I think the thing which changed the prime minister’s mind was the visit that he made to Srinagar and the tremendous ovation he received there and the fact that perhaps, as he said, a time had come for a third and final attempt at peace with Pakistan.”

Meanwhile, India has once again rejected third party mediation to resolve its longstanding dispute with Pakistan over the Himalayan region of Kashmir.

In an interview published in the Indian Express on Monday, Finance Minister Jaswant Singh said no third party would have the “instinctive understanding” of the problem.

Citing past examples of mediation to solve the Kashmir dispute which had not worked, Singh said: “Do you realise that when you talk of a third party, you assume whoever it may be, the United Nations or anybody else, will have the instinctive understanding of what we are talking about? “It will not.”

India and Pakistan on the other hand “understand each other’s nuances, which a foreign entity will never understand.

“We know not only each other’s language, but the pulse beat and blood flow of each other’s veins,” said Singh, who charted the course of India’s foreign policy since December 1998.

Singh said he was “mindful” of the fact that “Pakistan and India learn to absorb their differences and are able to at least chart a route map, on which to keep moving, to forsake bloodshed.

“Let Pakistan flourish and prosper within the borders of its political sovereignty but let it come to terms with its own identity and not seek that identity in a kind of atavistic and compulsive hostility to India,” he said. —AFP

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