India-Pakistan Talks on Kashmir End With No Progress : Asia: The debacle reinforces doubts the countries’ leaders are strong enough domestically to take initiatives to ease the dispute.

Talks between India and Pakistan on the Kashmir dispute ended in a flop Monday, with the countries still so far apart they could not even agree on a date for the next round of negotiations.

“We are in the same position as when we started,” Indian Foreign Secretary J.N. Dixit told reporters before catching a plane home from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.

The continuing stalemate after more than seven hours of negotiations bodes ill for the ability of Indian Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to resolve the most divisive issue between their nations.

The debacle reinforces persistent doubts that the leaders, especially Bhutto, who was reelected Pakistan’s head of government three months ago, are strong enough domestically to take the necessary initiatives to ease the 46-year-old territorial dispute.

The United States and other third countries are worried that in the worst-case scenario, the Kashmir controversy could suck India and Pakistan into a nuclear war.

Western concern has been fueled by the anti-Indian insurgency that began in Kashmir in 1990 and India’s widespread campaign of repression implemented to combat it.

After the two days of talks in Islamabad failed to yield any positive results, Pakistani Foreign Secretary Shahryar Khan said his country would insist India end “human rights abuses” in Kashmir as a prerequisite to resuming negotiations at any level.

Pakistan has demanded that leaders of the insurgency be released from Indian prisons and that some Indian troops withdraw from the mountain state, the foreign secretary said.

At a joint news conference, the Indian and Pakistani foreign secretaries said their discussions, the first in more than a year, marked the first time in a long period that Kashmir had been debated specifically and completely.

Dixit said the mere fact that the talks took place showed progress. But Khan said there was no movement at all on the core issue: ending rancorous disagreement about Kashmir.

A joint statement issued after Dixit and Khan held their four sessions of talks said only that the two countries would consult each other on the question of subsequent negotiations.

Indian correspondents who covered the talks that began Sunday said the countries went into the session with totally different agendas. India first wanted to strive for demilitarization of the Siachen glacier, where Indian and Pakistani troops are engaged in a frigid faceoff, and to discuss maritime boundaries and other less contentious issues.

Pakistan, on the other hand, reportedly wanted to zero in on Kashmir.

India’s position has been that the status of Kashmir is to be decided by India and Pakistan alone, as the 1972 Simla accord between them stipulates. But at the Islamabad talks, the Pakistanis rejected that approach out of hand.

“We made it quite clear to the Indians that the Simla Agreement has become ineffective over the past 20 years because of the non-willingness on the part of India to negotiate issues in accordance with its spirit,” a Pakistani was quoted as telling the Pioneer, a New Delhi daily.

After assurances from India that it was ready to deal on Kashmir, Pakistan withdrew a proposed U.N. resolution condemning alleged Indian human rights abuses in the region.

India, which maintains that its state of Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of Indian territory, is adamant about rejecting third-party involvement. Dixit said Monday that U.N. resolutions on Kashmir passed in 1948 and 1949 are now “irrelevant.”