Foes Assail Musharraf’s Kashmir Proposals

Opposition parties accused President Pervez Musharraf of betrayal Tuesday after he suggested new options for solving the long-running dispute over Kashmir, including jointly ruling the territory with India.

The Pakistani leader surprised his nation, and angered many in the political opposition, when he suggested to diplomats and reporters Monday that Pakistan must drop its long-held demand for a referendum on the territory’s future.

He proposed several ways of changing Kashmir’s status with a new approach to the decades-old conflict over the region, which has triggered two wars between India and Pakistan. The ideas included demilitarizing the territory; putting some areas under joint Pakistani-Indian rule or United Nations control; or granting independence to some portions of Kashmir.

Musharraf said Pakistan could not accept creating a new international border along the Line of Control, the 1971 cease-fire line that divides Kashmir.

Although the territory is mainly Muslim, as is Pakistan, there are also large Hindu and Buddhist communities in the portion under the control of India, a country that is mainly Hindu.

Musharraf suggested that the territory be seen as seven regions, five of which have Muslim majorities. Only two of the regions are currently under Pakistani control.

“For progress toward a Kashmir solution, these regions [could] be identified, demilitarized and their status changed,” Musharraf said. “I believe that the Kashmiris would support this option as they would get authority.”

Speaking Monday at an iftar, the evening meal that breaks the daily fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Musharraf said he had “never spoken to anyone like this” about the Kashmir dispute.

The general told his guests that he was giving the media “food for thought” and called for a debate of his ideas.

And he provoked an impassioned one in his nation, where one of the few unifying political principles has long been the insistence that Kashmir is part of Pakistan and where the bottom line has always been that United Nations resolutions demand that Kashmiris be given the right to choose their fate.

An influential opposition alliance of Islamic parties, the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal, called for Pakistanis to move against the military ruler if he tries to implement such a solution to the Kashmir standoff.

“Musharraf has no right to suggest a solution of the Kashmir dispute,” Qazi Hussein Ahmed, the leader of Jamaat-i-Islami, Pakistan’s largest religious party, said during a news conference. “He is a military ruler and doesn’t command the support of the Pakistani people.”

Musharraf, the military’s chief of staff, seized power in a 1999 coup.

He has survived several assassination attempts since becoming a frontline ally in the U.S.-declared war on terrorism after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Pakistan and India, both nuclear powers, have fought three wars since independence from Britain in 1947, and came close to a fourth when the countries deployed troops along their border in the wake of a bloody December 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament that New Delhi blamed on Islamic militants.

Full-scale war may have been averted by the intervention of the United States.

“If both sides continue to stick to their stands, the dispute would persist for 100 years without any solution,” Musharraf said.

Pakistani officials said that Musharraf was expecting a favorable response from the Indian government. But New Delhi’s initial public reaction didn’t sound enthusiastic.

“We do not believe that ... Kashmir is a subject on which discussions can be held through the media,” Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna told reporters, adding that the issue should be taken up in talks between the two nations.