Prime Ministers of India, Pakistan to Meet

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

Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz arrived today on a tour of regional capitals as head of the South Asian Assn. for Regional Cooperation, which is trying to promote closer economic ties between nations in the region.

Aziz, a former Citibank executive, 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 might produce agreement on opening bus service between 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 over rival claims to Kashmir. After insisting for months that they are ready to give up entrenched positions and make lasting peace, leaders of both countries have repeated hard-line views on the disputed region in recent days.

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

The Indian military says it has blocked about 60 attempts by militants to infiltrate Indian-held territory from the Pakistani side this year. The number climbed in recent weeks 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,” Indian army chief 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 in the United States, Washington pressured Pakistan to rein in the militant groups, several of which were Al Qaeda allies. 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 340 miles along the two nations’ international border and a 1972 cease-fire line, or Line of Control, that divides the disputed region between India and Pakistan.

When the British pulled out of the subcontinent in 1947, they told the Hindu maharajah who ruled the mainly Muslim territory of Jammu and Kashmir to choose between joining India or Pakistan. The two neighboring nations immediately went to war over the region.

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 binding referendum, in the face of New Delhi’s continued claim that Kashmir is its territory and that India’s boundaries cannot be redrawn.

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

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