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Nothing to do with cricket, says Pakistan

B. Muralidhar Reddy

"Obviously, there is a misunderstanding"

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan on Sunday maintained that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had accepted an invitation to visit the country and that the dates of travel were to be "worked out."

Foreign Office spokesperson Tasneem Aslam said Dr. Singh accepted the invitation long ago, and it had nothing to do with the ongoing India-Pakistan cricket series.

"He is welcome to visit Pakistan under the pending invitation to witness one of the one-day international cricket matches between India and Pakistan just like Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf did in April 2005 when he visited India," Ms. Aslam told The Hindu .

She denied a report attributed to her by an international news agency that Pakistan had extended a new and specific invitation to Dr. Singh to watch an ODI. The news agency quoted her as saying that Dr. Singh had accepted the fresh invitation.

"Obviously, there is a misunderstanding. I only talked about the invitation extended by Gen. Musharraf in his latest television interview to an Indian journalist. As you are aware, Gen. Musharraf, in the course of the interview, extended an invitation to Dr. Singh to witness any of the cricket matches," Ms. Aslam said.

In the interview to CNN-IBN on Friday, Gen. Musharraf invited Dr. Singh to visit Pakistan to watch a cricket match and for talks on the Kashmir issue.

"I invite him [Dr. Singh] right here and let me say that I invite him to watch any part of the series," Gen. Musharraf had said. The Indian team is on a 43-day tour of Pakistan during which they will play three Tests and five one-day internationals.

"Conditional"

The spontaneous invitation of Gen. Musharraf to Dr. Singh was `conditional'. Pakistan President said if Dr. Singh accepts his invitation to visit Pakistan but both sides do "nothing about the peace process I am afraid we are just wasting our time."

Dr. Singh and Gen. Musharraf jointly watched the sixth one-day international between the two sides in New Delhi in April last year. In talks on the sidelines, they pledged to make the peace process begun in January 2004 "irreversible."

Interestingly, India had then invited Gen. Musharraf after he had said in a television interview that while he would like to watch an India-Pakistan cricket match, he would not go to India uninvited. Eventually, Gen. Musharraf converted the trip into a bilateral visit.

During that visit, he invited Dr. Singh to visit Pakistan. Since then, Islamabad has renewed the invitation twice. United Progressive Alliance (UPA) chairperson and Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi was also invited for a visit.

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Nothing to do with cricket, says Pakistan

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