NEW DELHI: India’s Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh is leveraging his status as the first state guest of the Barack Obama administration to ensure that the United States fully understands Indian concerns on issues that impact its national security, primarily Pakistan and China, with both of which the US is closely engaged.

Despite Indian public opinion being squarely against resuming a dialogue with nuclear-armed Pakistan, Dr Singh reiterated his offer of talks with Pakistan, with the rider that Islamabad has to abjure terrorism and violence.

If Pakistan comes to the “table with good faith and sincerity,” India is “ready to pick up the threads of the dialogue,” Dr Singh said, days ahead of the first anniversary of the horrific 26/11 Mumbai attacks, after which India suspended the India-Pakistan peace process. “The trauma of that attack continues to haunt us,” said Dr Singh. “Terrorism poses an existential threat to the civilised world and must be defeated. We should not harbour any illusions that a selective approach to terrorism, tackling it in one place while ignoring it in others, will work,” he said. “My government has invested heavily over the past few years in normalising relations with our neighbour Pakistan. We made considerable progress on the road to a durable and permanent settlement of all outstanding issues,” he told the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations. “I have said that we are ready to pick up the threads of the dialogue, including on issues related to Jammu & Kashmir.”

However, Pakistan’s “selective approach to terrorism, tackling it in one place while ignoring it in others,” would not work, he reiterated. “Pakistan has nothing to fear from India. It’s a tragedy that Pakistan has come to the point of using terror as an instrument of state policy,” he said.

Emphasising the Prime Minister’s point, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao said, “The present situation is not conducive to the resumption of dialogue with Pakistan. The weight of public opinion is against it. The mood of the people, the mood of the parliament is against it,” Rao said. “For this dialogue to regain momentum, we will need to have progress by Pakistan to take action against terrorism,” Rao said.

Singh is using the visit, during which he will become the only Indian leader to be successfully feted as a state guest of two successive US administrations (George W Bush in 2005 and Barack Obama in 2009), to also take a dig at the domestic disarray within the Pakistan polity, saying his government does not know with whom to talk in Islamabad.

“We would like democracy to succeed and flourish in Pakistan. But we have to recognise that the power today rests virtually with

the army,”