India Refuses to Talk Peace

Amid fresh shelling along the India-Pakistan border and a steady exodus of foreigners fearing a war, leaders of the two countries departed for a regional security summit Sunday with little chance that they would meet to talk peace.

Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee told reporters that “there is no such plan” for him to meet Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf at a summit of Central Asian leaders in Almaty, Kazakhstan, that begins today.

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin plans to meet separately with Vajpayee and Musharraf at the summit of 16 nations and hopes to persuade them to talk. On a stopover in Tajikistan en route to the summit Sunday, Musharraf expressed optimism that Russia, a traditional ally of India, could help.

“I think that President Putin can persuade India to join a dialogue,” Musharraf told reporters.

Vajpayee, however, insists that the two sides have nothing to talk about until Musharraf stops what India calls “cross-border terrorism” in Kashmir. New Delhi says that the Pakistani military supports guerrillas who cross into Indian-controlled areas of the disputed Himalayan territory.

Musharraf says he already has cracked down on militants, but the United States and other Western governments are demanding more action to ease tensions between the nuclear-armed rivals.

Less than a year ago, the two leaders were smiling together at the marble symbol of eternal love, the Taj Mahal. That meeting, however, ended in disappointment, and now they are glaring at each other against the imagined backdrop of a mushroom cloud.

Vajpayee, a Hindu poet, and Musharraf, a Muslim paratrooper, never had much chance of bonding at their three-day summit in the Indian city of Agra last July. But at least they were talking for the first time since 1999, when Musharraf, as head of the Pakistani army, directed an incursion into Kargil, in Indian-held territory, that brought the region to the brink of war.

The heavy fighting left hundreds of soldiers and civilians dead. At the time, Pakistan said the attack was carried out by guerrilla fighters, not regular army troops. Kargil created bad feelings between Vajpayee and Musharraf, who later seized power in a bloodless coup.

Nevertheless, Vajpayee defied hard-liners in his government and agreed to Musharraf’s request for talks at Agra without a set agenda. Bureaucrats and diplomats normally use pre-negotiated limits on what can be discussed as virtual leashes on leaders when they sit down to deal with disputes as entrenched as Kashmir.

Musharraf, who was born in New Delhi but fled in 1947 to newly created Pakistan with his family, visited his ancestral home before the Agra summit. The open welcome he received raised hopes of a breakthrough.

Officials at the Agra talks reported that they were going well, without giving specifics. Rumors started that a landmark deal might be in the works.

As the final day of talks was set to start, Musharraf spoke to Indian news editors at a breakfast session. His remarks were supposed to be off the record, but an Indian satellite news network aired a videotape. It showed Musharraf saying Pakistanis didn’t trust India’s government and thought that it was stonewalling in the hope that the Kashmir dispute would go away.

With every tough line Musharraf delivered, the prospects of any deal with Vajpayee disintegrated. Indian pundits quickly attacked Vajpayee and his closest lieutenants for letting Musharraf win the media battle, by making the Indian delegation seem aloof and unwilling to compromise.

Vajpayee’s sense of being burned at Agra by Musharraf, and the Pakistani leader’s more media-savvy handlers, are crucial to why the Indian leader, and some of his key Cabinet members, are very reluctant to trust Musharraf now, regardless of the risks.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld will visit the region this week and hopes to get Vajpayee and Musharraf to start talking peace again. But he will have to find a way to crack the wall of distrust cemented at Agra.

As tensions rise again, the U.S., Britain, Canada, Israel and the United Nations have all asked nonessential embassy staff and their families to leave India and Pakistan. There has not been a panicked rush out, but many are making departure plans.

Several mid-ranking U.S. Embassy employees in New Delhi have booked flights.

Travel agents in New Delhi say they have been inundated with calls from foreigners as well as locals scrambling to get reservations, which were already hard to come by after airlines reduced their schedules in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S.

Meanwhile, local newspapers and magazines are full of doomsday scenarios.

The cover of the current issue of India Today, the country’s leading newsmagazine, features a photo montage of terrified people fleeing a nuclear mushroom cloud rising behind the India Gate arch, a New Delhi landmark.

A graphic that runs over two inside pages shows many of the capital’s main government buildings crumbling and burning. It offers this timeline of a nuclear blast:

“5 secs: 200,000 people will die instantly at ground zero.

“10 secs: Blast wave will destroy buildings in 10 km radius.

“5 hrs: 300,000 people will be injured, half of them severely.

“10 hours: India’s retaliation will destroy all cities in Pakistan.”

Sandwiched between pages of the potential-war coverage is a recruitment ad for the Indian army. “Be an army man,” it says. “Be a winner for life.”

Both India and Pakistan say nuclear war is unthinkable, but so far, neither has been able to lead the way out of an escalating confrontation that began in December when terrorists attacked India’s Parliament complex.

Fourteen people died in the assault, including the five gunmen, whom India claims were sent by Pakistan.

Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes repeated Sunday that his country has a policy not to be the first to use nuclear weapons, but he told an Asian security conference in Singapore that India won’t back down.

“India will not be impulsive,” Fernandes said. “Neither will we waver in our determination, for the simple reason that what we have been fighting and will continue to fight is the war against terrorism.

“All we expect of the Musharraf regime is that it desist from supporting terrorism.”

Meanwhile Sunday, an Indian woman and a Pakistani paramilitary official were reported killed by mortar fire in Kashmir.

India also said eight civilians were injured when Pakistani troops launched a mortar attack on Garkwal village, while Pakistan said four soldiers were injured by Indian shelling of the nearby Charwa sector of Sialkot district in Punjab province.

With as many as 1 million troops facing each other along the India-Pakistan border and the so-called Line of Control that divides Kashmir, it will not be easy for either side to back down.

Pakistan wants foreign monitors deployed along the Line of Control to verify that its military isn’t assisting guerrillas crossing into the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir.

But India has repeatedly ruled that idea out, in part because it sees any attempt to “internationalize” the dispute as a Pakistani effort to force third-party mediation. India has long insisted that the Kashmir conflict can be resolved only between India and Pakistan.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage also plans to visit India and Pakistan this week.

When U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell made a trip to the region in January, troops were quickly mobilizing along the border and it looked like the situation would deteriorate. But Powell persuaded Vajpayee to give Musharraf more time to meet demands, such as the return of 20 suspects wanted for trial in India on terrorism and other charges.

Once Powell was back in Washington and the media spotlight shifted to the Middle East crisis, however, Musharraf made it clear that he had no intention of meeting India’s demand for the suspects.