Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs
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“I tried to reach out to India from the very first day of my term. But I got a bad response when the meeting at the UN was cancelled. We decided that we could wait for a response until elections in India,” Mr. Khan said, maintaining that the resolution of Kashmir remained the main concern for Pakistan. On Wednesday, the Ministry of External Affairs had criticised Mr. Khan’s reference to Kashmir during the Kartarpur corridor groundbreaking ceremony, calling it an attempt to “politicise a pious” occasion. Mr. Khan, who claimed he had not seen the Indian response, said that resolving Kashmir was nonetheless important, and had been discussed in the past. Significantly, the Pakistani Prime Minister referred to the “4-step formula” for the resolution of Kashmir that was devised during the tenures of President Musharraf and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, more than a decade after it had been shelved as a possible way forward to consider. ‘Positive response’ He said that the response in Pakistan to the corridor had been very “positive” and he hoped that India would respond to the “consensus for peace” which he said was shared by all stakeholders including the military in Pakistan. To a question about whether he might consider extending the initiative from the Kartarpur shrine to other shrines that Indians are keen to visit, Mr. Khan said that his government hoped to promote religious tourism in the country, and could consider other proposals for shrines such as the Sharada Peeth in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, Katasraj temple in Sindh as well as a recently discovered Buddha statue near Islamabad.
