Indian and Pakistani leaders get together Wednesday at a provincial summit in Bhutan, but a spy scandal dented already slim hope that they could find a way back to substantive peace negotiations.
Tuesday just before Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh going away for the peak, said officials in New Delhi that an Indian civil servant working at their embassy in Islamabad had been arrested on suspicion of secrets from Pakistani intelligence agencies.
The event is likely to further sour atmosphere between the two nations ahead of a likely one-on-one meeting between Singh and Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani in the Bhutanese capital Thimphu.
The two prime ministers will attend the opening ceremony Wednesday afternoon of the 16th The summit of the eight-nation South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).
Indian authorities had floated the prospect of a two-way meeting on the sidelines to talk about a prolonged quarrel water, but Pakistan has made it clear that they want a formal, open conversation.
"It is time for India to make his mind whether it wants to connect or not .... appointment is the only way forward," Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said the Indian CNN-IBN television channel on Tuesday.
"We must go further than a handshake," said Qureshi, referring to Singh and Gilani is superficial exchange of courtship in a 47-nation meeting on nuclear safety in Washington previous this month.
India broke all dialogue with Pakistan after the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which killed at least 166 people and was accused by New Delhi on Pakistan-based militants.
Contact was hesitantly resumed at a meeting of top officials in the Foreign Ministry in New Delhi in February, but India insisted the recommencement of proper dialogue depended Pakistan prosecution of those responsible for the Mumbai killing.
Qureshi said it was time for India to move forward and stop demonizing Pakistan.
"We have to accept terrorism is a common challenge. It is not us and you, there is a collective effort," he said.
Qureshi attended a meeting of SAARC Foreign Ministers meeting on Tuesday with the Indian Friend SM Krishna, but the latter refused to even corroborate that Singh and Gilani were to meet separately. "Let's wait until the prime minister comes," he told journalists.
During the foreign ministers gathered, invited Krishna to all SAARC nations to "unite against the forces of terrorism."
"In South Asia Region is chiefly affected by this threat, he said, without mentioning Pakistan by name.
SAARC groups Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and was formed in 1985 to promote growth and raise living standards for poor people in a region home to one fifth of humankind.
But 25 and 15 peaks later, it had little effect, mainly because of the unstable relationship between India and Pakistan nuclear, say critics.
The bitter rivals have fought three wars since the subcontinent's partition in 1947 and remain at odds over the region of Kashmir.
They are also locked in a struggle for power in Afghanistan, which joined the SAARC in 2007, adds a conflict with the United States to the group's headache.
It spionsak that occurred Tuesday involving a 53 years old junior civil servant who works in information service for the Indian embassy in Islamabad.
The woman, Madhuri Gupta, a second secretary at the embassy, was arrested for violating the official secrets act, which carries a minimum 10 years in prison, a senior police source told AFP. The source said she had been under surveillance for six months.
For smaller SAARC members are India-Pakistan dynamics in the way of their efforts to exploit the group's possible in other areas, including trade, development, water sharing and ecological controls.
Bhutan hosts the summit for the first time and the small Himalayan kingdom wants to focus on type of weather modify.
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