ISLAMABAD, 1 April 2004 — President Gen. Pervez Musharraf warned that the peace process to end five decades of enmity with India will stall unless there’s progress on Kashmir in coming talks.

The two countries agreed on a road map for peace in February, and officials are due to start talks in May and June on various issues including their territorial dispute over the divided Himalayan region.

In an appearance on a state-run television recorded late Tuesday, Musharraf said the two countries needed to break the deadlock by July-August, or confidence-building measures initiated in the recent months would suffer a setback and the peace process would stall.

“If peace process does not move forward, then I will not be a party to it,” he said on PTV’s “News Night” program.

“I had informed the Indian leadership and the Western powers that if talks on Kashmir were not initiated within the set timeframe, then there will be no use of continuing the dialogue,” he said.

He insisted that both India and Pakistan should show flexibility on the Kashmir issue and go beyond their stated positions, but did not elaborate what would be his next step if the two countries failed to move forward.

He was also assuring domestic critics he was not selling out on the emotive Kashmir issue, analysts said.

“We have to move forward on Kashmir. We have to resolve it,” Musharraf said. “The foreign ministers will meet in July-August... If we don’t move forward, I am not in the process,” he said.

Just months before Musharraf’s deadline, his Indian negotiating partner, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, faces general elections in April and May.

Analysts said it would be difficult for Pakistan to sustain talks with India without some sign of progress on Kashmir and Musharraf was putting pressure on India to get serious.

“There is a school of thought that India would negotiate purposefully on trade and other issues, but just go through the motions on Kashmir,” said former Foreign Secretary Tanvir Ahmed Khan.

“What he probably meant was he’d like to see some concrete results, that the issue of Kashmir gets firmly embedded in the forthcoming India-Pakistan dialogue,” he said.

Foreign secretaries meeting in May or June will launch a “composite dialogue” and will discuss both Kashmir and measures to reduce the risk of nuclear and conventional war.

Officials from other ministries will meet in July to tackle a range of issues, including economic links. Foreign ministers will then meet in August to review overall progress.

“It is very important for Pakistan to show some results to the domestic audience, to show some progress,” said Ershad Mahmud of the Institute of Policy Studies.

“It would be difficult for him to continue a fruitless process for a long time,” he said, adding that popular support for the talks was fragile.

“There is very big enthusiasm among Pakistanis but it is superficial, it’s not deep rooted. It will be short-lived unless we get some concrete gesture on Kashmir,” he said.

Gestures India could make might include releasing prisoners, reducing troop numbers in Indian Kashmir or getting substantive talks going with political separatist groups, he said.

Kashmir, a former princely state claimed by both countries, has been the cause of two out of three wars between them since they gained independence from Britain in 1947.

Pakistan supports a UN resolution to let Kashmiris decide whether they want to be part of India or Pakistan, but India opposes it.

In recent months, the two countries have taken a number of confidence-building steps, including restoration of diplomatic ties and transportation links that were severed when they almost fought a war in 2002 after an attack by militants on India’s Parliament.