DUBAI: Foreign minister has welcomed mediation efforts by the United Arab Emirates between his country and India but told UAE newspaper Khaleej Times that he was not planning to meet his Indian counterpart in the country.
Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar are visiting the Gulf state at the same time.
"I am here for a bilateral visit. I am not here for a India-specific agenda," Qureshi told the daily, which published a video excerpt of the interview.
"We welcome third party facilitation ... But no matter what friends like the UAE say the initiative has to be indigenous," he added.
A senior Emirati diplomat said last week that the UAE is mediating between India and Pakistan to help the nuclear-armed rivals reach a "healthy and functional" relationship after military tension over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir. India's foreign ministry spokesman had tweeted that Jaishankar's discussions in the UAE would focus on economic cooperation and community welfare.
His Indian counterpart Subrahmanyam Jaishankar visited the emirate of Abu Dhabi on Sunday, a spokesman for New Delhi's ministry of external affairs tweeted. Pakistan's foreign ministry said there was no scheduled meeting between the two ministers.
Yousef Al Otaiba, the UAE's envoy to Washington, confirmed last week that the Gulf nation had played a role "in bringing the Kashmir escalation down and created a ceasefire, hopefully". "They might not, sort of, become best friends but at least we want to get it to a level where it's functional, where it's operational, where they are speaking to each other... that's our goal," he added, in an online talk with Stanford University's Hoover Institution.—Agencies
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