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.