Days after Sharif’s offer to hold talks with Delhi, US says ‘we support direct dialogue between India, Pakistan’
Miller’s remarks came two days after Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif offered to hold talks with India to address all serious and outstanding issues. Bilateral relations between Islamabad and New Delhi have been tense since August 2019 when India changed the special status of Jammu and Kashmir. “As we have long said, we support direct dialogue between India and Pakistan on issues of concern. That has long been our position,” State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters on Wednesday at his daily news conference.“We can’t allow terrorism to be normalised; we can not allow that to become the basis for getting us into discussions with Pakistan. To me it is a fairly common sense proposition,” he said in June. The US supports direct dialogue between India and Pakistan on issues of concern, a senior Biden administration official has said.There has been continued strain in ties between India and Pakistan on a number of issues including Islamabad’s continued support to cro