What was billed to be a serious and meaningful dialogue has ended in a disaster but then July has always been a bad month for Indo-Pak talks. The Vajpayee-Musharraf summit in Agra (July, 2001) ended in acrimony and bitterness; when Manmohan Singh met the Pakistani PM Yousef Raza Gilani at the Egyptian sea-resort of Sharm-el-Sheikh, also in July last year, the joint declaration caused a furore and further talks were put on hold.

External Affairs Minister S Krishna and his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmud Qureshi were expected to reduce the trust-deficit between the two countries when they met yesterday in Islamabad. But the dialogue ended in a diplomatic disaster with both sides blaming each other for the collapse of talks and trading charges at the joint press conference. Ironically, all this after the Foreign Secretaries had met last month to pave the way for yesterday’s meetings.

While India wanted concrete action from Pakistan in checking terrorism and bringing to justice the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks, Islamabad insisted on a time-frame for the resolution of other issue between the two nations.

The Pakistani minister tried to score brownie points with his domestic constituency in mind. At one stage during the joint press conference, he said the Indian minister agreed with him that the Indian Home Secretary G K Pillai’s remarks linking ISI with the Mumbai conspiracy were uncalled for. Krishna’s silence was taken to be a confirmation but the Indian side vehemently clarified that the minister was just being polite.

While Pakistani officials insisted that India was unwilling to look at some of its “core concerns” , New Delhi accused Islamabad of shifting the goal-posts time and again.

Pakistan was unwilling to give any categorical assurance on the probe being conducted by it into the Mumbai massacre. But on the other hand, it wanted India to give a time-frame for the settlement of other issues between the two nations.

Indian officials deny India insisted on a time-line for punishing the Mumbai attackers. “We know there can?t be time-lines on such issues? and all we wanted from Pakistan was to show some sincerity in taking the Mumbai probe to its logical conclusion,” they claimed.

Pakistan also wanted India to revive the joint anti-terror mechanism. But the Indian side wanted an assurance that Islamabad would sincerely act against JUD chief Hafiz Saeed and others making hate speeches against India.

While India maintained that the situation in Jammu and Kashmir and the killings of civilians by security forces were its internal matter, Pakistan disagreed and sought to question New Delhi on “human rights violations” and even the imposition of curfew in parts of the Kashmir Valley.