Key points
- Bilawal warns of India’s “new normal” of war after terror attacks
- India and Pakistan have dispatched top lawmakers to Washington
- Bilawal backs US mediation, criticises India’s stance
WASHINGTON, United States: Weeks after a military crisis, India and Pakistan have dispatched top lawmakers to press their cases in the United States, where President Donald Trump has shown eagerness for diplomacy between them.
After crisscrossing the world, the delegations descended this week at the same time on Washington, which played a key mediatory role in a ceasefire after four days of fighting between the nuclear-armed adversaries in May.
Active role for Trump administration
Pakistan has embraced an active role for the Trump administration while India, which has close relations with Washington, has been more circumspect and has long refused outside mediation on the flashpoint issue of Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK).
“Just like the United States and President Trump played a role in encouraging us to achieve this ceasefire, I believe they should play their part in encouraging both sides to engage in a comprehensive dialogue,” said Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, the scion of a political dynasty whose Pakistan People’s Party says it belongs neither to the governing coalition nor opposition.
“I don’t quite understand the Indian government’s hesitance,” he told AFP.
“They deserve appreciation”
“I’m the first to criticise the United States for so many reasons, but where they do the right thing, where they do the difficult task of actually achieving a ceasefire, they deserve appreciation.”
Trump has repeatedly credited his administration with averting nuclear war and said the United States had negotiated an agreement to hold talks between the two sides at a neutral site, an assertion that met India’s silence.
Pakistan had cool relations with Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden, whose aides bitterly resented Islamabad’s role in the Afghanistan war, but Pakistan has quickly worked to woo Trump including with the arrest of a suspect in a deadly 2021 attack that killed more than 170 people, including 13 US troops, during the withdrawal from Kabul.
Kashmir needs to be on the table
Bilawal — recalling how his mother, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, was killed in an attack — said Pakistan was ready to discuss terrorism with India but that Kashmir as a “root cause” also needed to be on the table.
He said that India was establishing a dangerous new precedent in South Asia where whenever there is a terrorist attack in any country, “you go straight to war.”
“I think that the fate of 1.7 billion people and our two great nations should not left in the hands of these nameless, faceless, non-state actors and this new normal that India is trying to impose on the region,” he said.
The two delegations have no plans to meet in Washington.
