Relatively little shift in Pak attitude towards India: Scholar

Though Pakistan fears that a repeat of the Mumbai attacks could be "very dangerous" to it, there is relatively little shift in its attitude towards India which it views as a "threat", a noted US scholar has said.

Though Pakistan fears that a repeat of the Mumbai attacks could be "very dangerous" to it, there is relatively little shift in its attitude towards India which it views as a "threat", a noted US scholar has said.

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Dan Markey of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington-based think-tank, was recently in Pakistan, where he met top officials of the country.

"We did actually have a chance to meet with Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir in Islamabad. And while I can't really characterise those discussions in detail, I can say that, across the board, there is, to my eyes, relatively little shift in Pakistani attitudes about what India represents," Markey, a Senior Fellow for India, Pakistan and South Asia at the Council, said.

But, he said there is "certainly an understanding and a fear, a palpable fear that what happened after Mumbai (attacks) could happen again and would be very, very dangerous for Pakistan."

"So there's a desire to try to get out of the post-Mumbai rut, but that doesn't reflect some deeper shift in attitudes about, you know, the purported threat that India represents to Pakistan," Markey said.

Pakistanis are open to talks and see the dialogue as a way to try to reduce tensions with India, "but they don't want to be pushed around," he said.