Rattled by PM's tough talk Zardari skips NAM meet

Islamabad: Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has decided against attending the Non-Aligned Movement Summit at Sharm-el Shaikh in Egypt in July to avoid meeting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

When the two leaders met at the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Summit at Yekaterinburg in Russia on Tuesday, Manmohan Singh bluntly told Zardari that Pakistan must stop terror groups based on its soil from targeting India.

"I am happy to meet you, but my mandate is to tell you that the territory of Pakistan must not be used for terrorism," Singh had told Zardari.

The Prime Minister also set Zardari a one-month deadline to show results before the NAM Summit, in which they were supposed to have met.

But Pakistan Foreign Minisiter Shah Mahmood Qureshi told CNN-IBN that India and Pakistan need to go beyond terrorism and 26/11.

"Terrorism is a global phenomenon. What is there to be embarrassed about? It's a menace that we have to collectively deal with. We sit across the table and discuss issues between us, terrorism is just one issue. Let's go beyond Mumbai. What happened in Mumbai is tragic and we need to cooperate with each other to overcome those tragedies," said Qureshi.

After the Singh-Zardari meeting in Yekaterinburg it was announced that the Foreign Secretaries of the two countries would meet to discuss terrorism and then the two leaders would "take stock" of their deliberations when they meet in Sharm-el Shaikh.

However, the Pakistani government had also reacted to Singh's tough stand on terror by calling it unacceptable.

With Zardari opting out, the Pakistani delegation will be led by Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani.

The NAM Summit at Sharm-el Shaikh will start on July 15.

Meanwhile, Pakistan also appeared to have queered the pitch ahead of a crucial round of Foreign Secretary talks with India.

Speaking to a TV channel, Pakistan's Foreign Office Spokesperson Abdul Basit ruled out a conditional dialogue as unacceptable.

Basit said that Pakistan would raise Kashmir, Sir Creek and water sharing disputes as part of the eight-agenda items within the suspended composite dialogue.

But India has maintained that the two officials will only talk about Pakistan's crack own on anti-India terror groups and that New Delhi had not yet agreed to normalise relations with Islamabad.