Dr. Singh, who left Frankfurt for the US capital in the morning after an overnight’s stay to attend the Indo-US bilateral summit on September 27, was officially briefed about the incident by the national security advisor, Shivshankar Menon, before he, his wife Gursharan Kaur and other team members emplaned. The Prime Minister reacted to the terrorist attack in the hardest possible language saying “no words are strong enough to condemn the neinous terrorist attack on Hiranagar Police Station and the Army Camp at Samba in Jammu and Kashmir this morning. I convey my heartfelt condolences to families of the brave army and police officers, as well as the innocent civilians martyred in this cowardly attack. This is one more in the series of provocations and barbaric actions by the enemies of peace.”

The Prime Minister said: “We are firmly resolved to combat and defeat the terrorist menace that continues to receive encouragement and reinforcement from across the border. Such attacks will not deter us and will not succeed in derailing our efforts to find a resolution to all problems through a process of dialogue.”

Only yesterday, a top government official, accompanying the Prime Minister to attend the summit meeting with President Barack Obama said terrorism and extremism would not disappear from the region too soon. They have to be fought relentlessly to destroy their design and to punish the perpetrators ruthlessly. The issues concerning terrorism and security in the region are among others to feature prominently in the Indo-US bilateral summit talks as also during the proposed Singh-Shariff meet in New York on the UNGA sidelines.

Although the focus of the UN General Assembly this year is on the follow up to the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio, the quest for peace – regional as well as global – and conflict resolution seem to have taken precedence over the main agenda as global leaders are pushing the issue both inside the UNGA and on the sidelines as it is affecting economic growth, trade and development across countries and regions. The biggest groundbreaking move towards conflict resolution has come from Iran’s newly elected President Hasan Rouhani, whose address before the UNGA earlier this week seeking to work with the international community on nuclear cooperation, asserting that Iran’s nuclear programme is peaceful and dismissed sanctions and oil embergo against Iran as “war mongering.”

It is true that during their two-day presence earlier this week at the ongoing UNGA session, President Rouhani and President Obama did not shake hands or even cross paths, the two leaders had vowed that they were ready to engage immediately over Iran’s nuclear programme. The process is expected to start towards the end of this week itself at the diplomatic level. Reportedly, Rouhani is against meeting Obama on the UNGA sidelines to initiate the exercise directly over the head of the officials involved as the internal dynamic in Tehran is quite complicated. No Iranian leader has held hands of a US president after Jimmy Carter was in the White House.

President Obama too is aware of the ground reality in Tehran while appreciating the Iranian president’s public offer to cooperate on the issue. He had cautioned that the disputes with Iran over its nuclear programme can’t be solved overnight. Ironically, US lawmakers — both Democrats and Republicans – are still very deeply suspicious of Iran’s latest overtures even as Rouhani had emphatically said “nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction have no place in Iran’s defence doctrine.”