New Delhi:
As Foreign Minister SM Krishna faces flak for attacking Home Secretary GK Pillai in an interview to NDTV and the Opposition accuses the Home and Foreign Ministries of not being on the same page on Pakistan, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao called on Pillai on Thursday evening, a meeting that is being seen as an attempt to clear the air.
Nirupama Rao is understood to have briefed the Home Secretary about what transpired during the External Affairs Minister's visit to Pakistan.
In a blunt admission of what went wrong when the Foreign Ministers of India and Pakistan met in Islamabad last week, SM Krishna had told NDTV in an exclusive interview that Home Secretary GK Pillai's comments may have been factual, but they were poorly timed.
(Read: Home Secretary Pillai's remarks were true, but ill-timed, says Krishna)On the eve of the Indo-Pak talks, Pillai said that the interrogation of David Coleman Headley, who helped plan 26/11, revealed that Pakistan's ISI was involved "from beginning to end" with the attack against Mumbai.
"Well, the Home Secretary spoke the truth. The Home Secretary did convey whatever Headley had confessed, whatever Headley had told our interrogators, when a team of them went to US. I have absolutely no problem with that. I can live with that. But the only question is the timing." said Krishna in his interview on Wednesday.
(Read: Full Transcript)The Congress on Thursday, however, steered clear of External Affairs Minister's disapproval of the comments by Home Secretary Pillai on the eve of Indo-Pak talks. "It is essentially a governance issue. If at all, the Minister of External Affairs has said something, it is for the government to respond to it if it considers so essential," said party spokesperson Manish Tewari.
During a press briefing after the meeting, Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi had said Pillai's remarks were uncalled for, and tried to equate them to hate speeches by Hafiz Saeed, a leader of terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba, and the man who India holds responsible for its worst-ever terror attack.
The Pakistan Foreign Minister's outburst at the press conference in Islamabad, after his six hour long talks with SM Krishna were the most controversial headlines that emerged from the India-Pakistan talks. The fact that the External Affairs Minister did not object to Qureshi, at the press conference also led to widespread criticism at home.