KATMANDU/ISLAMABAD, 4 January — India and Pakistan showed little sign yesterday of using a regional summit to bridge their differences, despite world pressure to end a standoff . With the leaders of both India and Pakistan due to attend the two-day South Asia summit starting today, the United States, Britain and China urged them to seek a peaceful solution to the dispute.

The leaders of India and Pakistan both left home yesterday, with their respective armies locked in a hazardous border standoff. Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf both left for the Nepalese capital of Katmandu. While Vajpayee took the direct route to Katmandu, Musharraf opted for a stopover in close ally China — a decision prompted as much by the closure of Indian airspace to Pakistani aircraft as a sudden desire for talks with Beijing, just 10 days after his last visit.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, due to visit India and Pakistan and enlisted by US President George Bush to try to nudge the two toward talks, warned of "enormous problems" for global stability if the situation got out of hand. In the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, at the start of his tour, he said he would try to exert a calming influence on the two.

Officials from both India and Pakistan held out little hope that Vajpayee and Musharraf would meet on the sidelines of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. "I’m not here to conduct India-Pak relations," Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh told a news conference in Katmandu. "We have no request or information that they want to meet us."

Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokesman Rashid Saleem made similar comments ahead of the meeting of the group which also comprises Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka. "There has been no formal request for a meeting either from India or Pakistan," he told reporters in Katmandu.

And while diplomacy appeared to be making little headway, there was no letup on the military front either. Both sides traded fire again across the Line of Control, a now near daily event on the military cease-fire line dividing disputed Kashmir. Inside Kashmir, militants ambushed the Indian troops, killing two soldiers and wounding seven.

Both Pakistan and India, which held nuclear tests in 1998, have moved infantry, artillery and — defense analysts say — nuclear-capable missiles toward their border in the most lethal armed buildup since the two nations won independence from Britain in 1947. They have already fought three wars, two of them over Kashmir.

In Beijing, Musharraf told China’s Premier Zhu Rongji yesterday his country hopes for peace and was willing to work to ease current tensions with India through dialogue. "Pakistan hopes for peace, opposes war, and is willing to work to ease the current tensions through dialogue," the Xinhua news agency quoted Musharraf as telling Zhu at a meeting in Beijing last evening.

India has ruled out any one-to-one meeting between the two leaders at the SAARC summit, arguing that Pakistan had yet to respond adequately to demands that it crack down on militant groups blamed for last month’s attack on India’s parliament. It was hoped that talks between the two countries’ foreign ministers at the SAARC summit could pave the way for defusing the explosive situation.

"I don’t think war is a necessity. I will put in all efforts to avoid it," Vajpayee told reporters in the northern city of Lucknow, shortly before leaving for Katmandu. "If diplomatic methods can be applied to resolve the existing problems, I don’t see why we should resort to other means," Vajpayee said. But Vajpayee also said there could be no bilateral talks with Pakistan until "cross-border terrorism is stopped."