A meeting between the Prime Ministers of India and Pakistan in New York will require "an atmosphere" and delivery by Islamabad on issues raised by New Delhi, External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid said on Thursday.
"You want a meeting at the highest level. There has to be an atmosphere for it. There has to be a desire on both sides to meet which I can imagine is there, but the context, circumstances, and prevailing conditions have to be looked at," Khurshid told reporters in Bishkek.
"We have been saying this repeatedly that there are some issues on which some delivery and some satisfaction are to be shown," he said ahead of a meeting with his Pakistani counterpart Sartaj Aziz on the sidelines of a SCO meet in the Kyrgyzstan capital.
Khurshid's remarks were an apparent reference to India's call for Pakistan to take action against perpetrators of the 2008 Mumbai attacks and steps to curb activities of anti-India terrorist leaders like Jamaat-ud-Dawah chief Hafiz Saeed.
Pakistan has been pushing for a meeting between Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh on the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York later this month. India has been non-committal on the meeting.
Khurshid said he would come face-to-face with Aziz, the advisor to Sharif on Foreign Affairs, at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meet but insisted their talks would be an informal affair.
Asked about issues he is likely to take up with Aziz during the meeting tomorrow, Khurshid said, "I am sure we will have a chance to come face-to-face and discuss informally. We haven't sorted out anything formally in advance but let's see how things go."
He added: "It's very difficult not to meet him. We are sitting in the same building. We are not concentrating on any major bilaterals, we are concentrating on the SCO. "But since we are all going to have a lot of time we are going to use it for anything that is usefully discussed, exchanged."
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