NEW DELHI, 22 December 2003 — The UN-mandated referendum on the future of disputed Kashmir must be the basis for resolving the decades-old problem with rival India, Pakistan Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali said yesterday.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had offered, in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday, to set aside Islamabad’s 50-year-old demand to implement UN resolutions calling for both sides to withdraw troops and for Kashmiris to decide in a vote whether to be part of India or Pakistan.

Musharraf’s remarks were received with a mixture of relief and alarm and some commentators accused him of being too generous to India.

“I don’t think the president meant that,” Jamali said in an interview to Indian news television channel NDTV 24x7.

“I think I had talked about the basis, the basis of the resolution lies in the UN resolutions. That has to be kept in mind. You can’t overlook it... it is Pakistan, it is the Kashmiris and India. So we have to keep that as the base.”

The resolution calls for Kashmiris in both the Pakistani-and Indian-held parts of the territory to vote on whether a united Kashmir should join predominantly Hindu India or Islamic Pakistan. The vote has never taken place because of India’s objections.

Last week a close aide to Musharraf dismissed talk of any U-turn in policy saying the president’s offer was consistent with his previous policy statements.

Musharraf, speaking less than three weeks before a key South Asian summit, said that Pakistan and India needed to be flexible and move beyond stated positions if they wanted to resolve the thorny dispute over Kashmir.

The two nuclear-armed neighbors have fought two of their three wars over the revolt-racked state.

Late on Friday, Indian Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha welcomed Musharraf’s statement saying India would be ready to accept any change in the Pakistan position that a plebiscite in Kashmir was the only way out of the Kashmir dispute.

New Delhi controls around 45 percent of Muslim-majority Kashmir. A 14-year insurgency in Indian Kashmir has killed tens of thousands of people.

India blames the violence in Kashmir on militants based in Pakistan. Pakistan denies backing the rebels and says it only provides moral support to them.

Meanwhile, police in Indian Kashmir said yesterday 10 people, including eight separatist rebels, were killed in different incidents of violence in the past 24 hours.