The failure of (Colombo) talks is attributable to Pakistan's perception that the situation arising out of the nuclear tests carried out by the two countries has opened up for Pakistan the best prospect in recent history to take possession of the Kashmir Valley with the help of international intervention or arbitration ..

Pakistan will not return to the bilateral path until it comes to realise that the route of internationalising the Kashmir issue leads to nowhere. ...

India should ... be prepared to discuss the Kashmir issue with Pakistan either separately or along with other bilateral issues. India, however, cannot concede that Kashmir is the core issue and all other bilateral issues are, as a Pakistan spokesman recently put it, "peripheral" For India, Kashmir is not just a piece of territory open for given and take. Kashmir involves the sovereignty and unity of India and affects a basic organising principle of the Indian state, i.e. secularism. Irrespective of the compromises made with it and the recent onslaught upon it, secularism remains the essential basis of India's identity and unity. It is, therefore, unrealistic to expect that any government in power in India would agree to submit what is integral to its sovereignty, unity and identity, to arbitration by an outside power or agency.

In the meantime, India should continue to seize every opportunity to resume the bilateral dialogue with Pakistan ..

India has a vested interest in Pakistan's stability and democracy, which have come under severe strain due to its current economic difficulties exacerbated by the imposition of sanctions. India should, therefore, contribute whatever it can, and is acceptable to the government of Pakistan, to the latter's economic stabilisation ... Removal of non-tariff barriers on some 2000 items imported from SAARC countries and (offer) to conclude bilateral free trade agreements ... should be expanded to include items of export interest to Pakistan.

... It must be clearly understood that Kashmir cannot, for too long be retained as a part of India against the wishes of the Kashmiri people. So long as the Kashmiri people continue to nurture the humiliation and hurt suffered by them during the course of the suppression of insurgency, the embers of disaffection will keep on smouldering and flare up at the slightest of provocation. And each flare up will be more unmanageable - thus making India more susceptible to outside pressure - than the previous one. After that, it will be only a matter of time before India succumbs to outside pressure for arbitration or self- determination.

Acceptable Package: The only alternative is to commence, without losing time, a sustained effort to win the minds and hearts of the Kashmiri people by assuaging  their hurt feelings and restoring their bruised and battereddignity. This can be done only by opening a broad-based dialogue embracing all sections of society and evolving an acceptable package containing, among others, a cast iron guarantee that the experience of the recent past will never be repeated.

For this to happen, the BJP will have to give up some of its well known shibboleths. - that Kashmir is basically a security problem, that the main task is to contain Pakistan- aided insurgency, that the solution lies not in greater autonomy but in a closer integration with India, including the scrapping of Article 370 of the Constitution, and that Kashmir cannot be treated differently from other states of the Union ...      (Source: The Times of India, 17 August, 1998)