ISLAMABAD/SRINAGAR, 6 January 2005 — India’s foreign minister will visit Pakistan next month for talks on the nuclear rivals’ 57-year-old dispute over the Himalayan region of Kashmir, officials said yesterday. Indian External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh will hold talks with his Pakistani counterpart Khursheed Kasuri and President Pervez Musharraf during his visit in the first half of February, the official said on condition of anonymity.
He said a proposed bus service between the Indian- and Pakistani-controlled portions of Kashmir and reunions between divided Kashmiri families would also be discussed in addition to other bilateral issues under discussion as part of a yearlong peace process.
Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan confirmed that Singh had accepted an invitation to visit Pakistan, but said the exact dates for the trip were still being worked out.
Natwar’s planned visit follows an inconclusive dialogue between the top Foreign Ministry bureaucrats of the two countries on Kashmir last month — part of the peace process aimed at ending enmity between the South Asian neighbors, which have fought three wars since independence in 1947, two of them over Kashmir.
Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper yesterday quoted an unnamed senior Pakistani official as saying negotiations over Kashmir were moving to a “higher political level.”
Pakistan and India began a joint survey yesterday aimed at settling a border dispute in a marshland between the two countries, Khan said. The survey in Sir Creek area, between India’s western state of Gujarat and Pakistan’s southern Sindh province, will be completed between “three and four” weeks, Khan told Pakistan’s Geo television channel.
Meanwhile, Indian troops in Kashmir yesterday shot dead a top commander of a hard-line militant group, while six people were injured in a grenade blast, police said. Abu Assadullah, alias Janbaz, was killed during an encounter that lasted 21 hours in the village of Batkote, in northern Kupwara district.
Police said the dead commander was an ally of the hard-line militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba which wants Kashmir to secede from India and join with neighboring Pakistan. “Janbaz is a Pakistani national,” a police spokesman said.
Lashkar has been in the forefront of launching suicide attacks in Kashmir, since the group launched first such assaults on July 13, 1999.
Separately, a raid on a rebel hide-out in northern Baramulla district led to Indian troops recovering 123 grenades and 24 land and anti-personnel mines, besides explosives and other arms and ammunition, police said. In the summer capital Srinagar, four civilians and two policemen were injured in a grenade attack by suspected militants last evening, a police spokesman said.
Also in Srinagar, police prevented separatists from handing over a memorandum to a small UN office in Kashmir, police and witnesses said. “The memorandum was to urge the UN to implement UN Security Council resolutions on Kashmir passed on Jan. 5, 1948,” an activists from hard-line faction of region’s main separatist alliance said.
“Seven separatist activists were detained and others dispersed,” the spokesman said. Thousands of people have died in Kashmir since the eruption of anti-Indian insurgency in the region in 1989.
