India-Pakistan Talks on Kashmir May Yield Cross-Border Bus Service

The prime ministers of India and Pakistan plan to meet here today in an effort to find new grounds for compromise in the long-running conflict over Kashmir.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz arrived here Tuesday on a tour of regional capitals as head of the South Asian Assn. for Regional Cooperation, which promotes closer economic ties within the region.

Aziz has said he will use his visit with Indian leaders to seek progress in peace efforts that began last year.

Both countries have hinted that Aziz’s meeting with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh may produce agreement on opening bus service between the Indian- and Pakistani-controlled sections of Kashmir for the first time in 57 years of conflict over the Himalayan territory.

The two countries also are said to be near a deal on a $4.2-billion pipeline to deliver natural gas from Iran to India through Pakistan.

Aziz’s two-day visit comes amid mixed signals from India and Pakistan on their willingness to compromise on Kashmir. After insisting for months that they were ready to give up entrenched positions and make lasting peace, leaders of both countries in recent days have repeated hard-line views on the disputed region.

Indian security forces said they were winning a war against the separatists in Kashmir, which began in 1989. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf insisted again last week that the guerrillas were freedom fighters acting without anything but moral support from his country.

The Indian military says that, so far this year, it has blocked about 60 attempts by militants to infiltrate Indian-held territory from the Pakistani side. The number climbed in recent weeks even as Musharraf pressed Singh to move more quickly on negotiations over Kashmir.

“Let me tell you that I have no reason to believe that there has been any lack of effort in infiltration attempts from across the border,” India’s chief of army staff, Gen. Nirmal Chander Vij, said Monday. “During the current month alone, there have been eight such attempts, including two taking place during the last two to three days.”

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the United States pressured Pakistan to rein in the militant groups, several of which were allies of the Al Qaeda network. But as the guerrillas lose their strength, Pakistan loses leverage on the Kashmir issue.

India tightened the noose around the insurgents by completing a 12-foot-high fence this year that runs hundreds of miles along its international border with Pakistan and a 1972 cease-fire line, or Line of Control, that divides the disputed region between the two.

When the British pulled out of the subcontinent in August 1947, they told the Indian princes, including the Hindu maharajah who ruled the mainly Muslim territory of Jammu and Kashmir, to choose between joining India or Pakistan. As the king delayed, the two neighboring nations went to war over the region in October of that year, and it has been divided since.

Within days of the war, the maharajah chose India, but Pakistan has long insisted that he did so under pressure and that the people of Kashmir should be allowed to decide their fate in a binding referendum promised in a 1948 United Nations Security Council resolution.

Musharraf is the first Pakistani leader to publicly suggest that the dispute might be resolved without a vote by Kashmiris -- if India makes significant concessions. But he also has suggested that India is hardening its position.

Last week, Musharraf revived Pakistan’s demand for the plebiscite, in the face of New Delhi’s continued claim that Kashmir was its territory and that India’s boundaries could not be redrawn.

Pakistan will only drop its demand for a vote “if India is prepared to show flexibility,” Musharraf told an interviewer last week, adding that “at the moment ... we don’t see that.”