Lukewarm Start to S. Asian Peace Talks

India and Pakistan entered their third round of peace talks this week with little sign of significant progress toward resolving their dispute over Kashmir.

After two days of negotiations that kicked off the latest round of talks, the nuclear-armed neighbors on Wednesday were only able to repeat an old commitment to seek a peaceful settlement to the Kashmir conflict and announce the opening of a second bus link across the cease-fire line that divides the Himalayan territory. They also promised more talks on efforts to encourage travel and trade across the line and to reduce the chances of an accidental nuclear war.

There was no indication that a deal on Kashmir was near.

India and Pakistan agreed in January 2004 to begin structured peace talks to resolve the decades-long conflict over the region, and a range of other disputes.

The agreement to negotiate in a “composite dialogue” followed a crisis that brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war in 2002, after an attack on India’s Parliament killed 14 people. New Delhi blamed the assault on Pakistani militant groups and Pakistan’s spy agency.

Pakistan outlawed the groups but denied involvement.

So far, the biggest peace dividends for Kashmiris have been bus service between the Indian- and Pakistani-held areas and an end to artillery battles between Indian and Pakistani forces across the cease-fire line.

Hopes that the October earthquake centered in the Pakistani-controlled portion of Kashmir would lead to freedom of movement across the border have been dashed. Five points were opened to ease quake survivors’ suffering, but less than 1,000 people have crossed.

Before the current round of talks that began Tuesday, Mirwaiz Omar Farooq, who leads a moderate faction of a Kashmiri separatist alliance, complained that the peace process was moving too slowly.

“If the process continues as it is at present, then it may derail,” he warned Friday, after a weeklong visit to Pakistan.

India says Pakistan is not fulfilling a promise to make sure territory under its control is not used by militants to launch cross-border assaults.

Indian authorities blamed the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba for two recent attacks: In October, 62 people were killed in three bombings in New Delhi, and in December a militant armed with an assault rifle and grenades killed one person in the high-tech hub of Bangalore in southern India.

Pakistan banned Lashkar-e-Taiba in 2002, but the group took a new name, Jamaat ud-Dawa, and its members are running relief camps for quake survivors.

This week India’s security forces in Kashmir killed a man identified as the Pakistani mastermind of the New Delhi bombings, a Lashkar-e-Taiba militant named Abu Huzaifa.

As the violence and negotiating drag on, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has made audacious public proposals to break the deadlock in the Kashmir dispute.

On Jan. 7, he suggested in a television interview that, in exchange for previous Pakistani offers, India should lay the groundwork for a deal by pulling its troops out of Kupwara, Baramullah, the Kashmir Valley and Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir state.

India’s Foreign Ministry replied that troop deployments were an internal matter. The Indian military said militants were still operating bases in Pakistan despite denials from Islamabad.

But India’s army chief of staff, Gen. J. J. Singh, also said his forces had “been able to scale down the level of infiltration and deal a deadly blow” to insurgents. One Indian soldier is lost for every eight insurgents killed in Kashmir, he said.

In October 2004, Musharraf stunned his nation with a radical proposal to demilitarize both sides of Kashmir and share the territory with India or put it under the control of the United Nations.

He appeared to drop Pakistan’s long-standing demand that Kashmiris should decide in a vote supervised by the U.N. whether to become independent or join India or Pakistan. Opposition parties and militant leaders angrily accused him of selling out to India.

The Indian government has resisted Musharraf’s pressure for a dramatic solution. New Delhi has focused instead on gradual steps to build confidence by opening up borders to more trade and travel.