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Summary India sent a clear message to the US that no dictation on Kashmir would be accepted.
An Indian newspaper, quoting WikiLeaks, published that India did not want US intervention on the Kashmir issue.India also stopped Joe Biden from visiting India on the tour he was scheduled to visit Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. India considered that Biden’s visit to India along with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq would give the impression that India too was a country of the level of Afghanistan and Iraq. Weeks before the Obama administration appointed Richard Holbrooke as the Special Representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan, New Delhi sent a message to the United States that any move to include India in Holbrooke’s mendate would be “unacceptable.”In April 2008, former foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told US Assistant Secretary of State Richard A Boucher that India-Pakistan relations could not be held hostage to the issue of Kashmir alone.He told Boucher that the considered view of his party was that foreign policy should be based on strategic interests, not populism. The minister termed Nawaz Sharif’s approach as aggressive and said: “Our direction may be the same, but our tone may be different. We will have to be sensitive to public opinion.”Sharif is more in line with the popular mood, said Qureshi during the meeting.
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