NEW DELHI, 25 April 2003 — Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee yesterday said he was waiting for a response from Pakistan on his offers to resume talks on vexed bilateral issues such as Kashmir.
“Let us see how Pakistan responds,” Vajpayee told parliament’s upper house in reference to his earlier statements that India was willing to “extend a hand of friendship” to Pakistan.
“Stopping cross border infiltration and destruction of terrorist infrastructure can open the doors for talks,” he reiterated. He also said he “hoped a new beginning could take place between the two countries.”
After Vajpayee’s comments came in a briefing to the house on his weekend visit to Kashmir, where he first made the offer of talks, the opposition demanded that they should be taken into confidence on any negotiations with Pakistan.
“The prime minister should consult the opposition when negotiations with Pakistan will be formulated,” senior Congress member Natwar Singh said.
Meanwhile, Kashmir’s Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Syeed accused Islamabad of betraying a pledge to stop militants crossing into the region to join a revolt against Indian rule.
Sayeed also said that hundreds of militants had massed on the Pakistani side of the cease-fire line dividing Kashmir, ready to cross into Indian Kashmir as the snows blocking mountain passes melted.
“People are waiting there ... in the hundreds,” he said in Jammu, the winter capital of Jammu and Kashmir. “When the snow melts, passes become trafficable, therefore it’s easier to cross. It’s very difficult terrain. It’s very difficult to get hold of them.”
On the parched plains around this city in the south of the state, temperatures are already nudging 40 degrees Celsius and over the next month the winter snows will melt away.
A senior paramilitary official said yesterday that India was to speed up the fencing of a stretch of its borders with Pakistan to stem the infiltration.
The decision was taken at a high-level meeting of senior civil, intelligence army and paramilitary officials in Jammu.
Pakistan promised last year to stop rebels slipping across the border as a military standoff brought South Asia’s nuclear powers close to war. It says it gives only moral support to the Kashmiri “freedom struggle”.
Kashmir’s main pro-independence alliance officially announced yesterday that it would not hold talks with India’s pointman on Kashmir and would instead seek parleys at “the highest level.”
“The executive council and general council of Hurriyat has unanimously decided not to hold talks with N.N. Vohra,” Yasin Malik, a senior leader of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), said in Srinagar.
Malik heads the pro-independence Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), which is an important constituent of the main separatist conglomerate.
Hurriyat’s top two bodies met in Srinagar yesterday to decide whether to hold talks with Vohra, India’s newly appointed pointman on Kashmir. Vohra arrived in Kashmir on Monday for a weeklong tour, and he has been talking to pro-India leaders since.
A policeman was killed and two others were injured, one seriously, when a demining operation went badly wrong yesterday, police said. Eight others, including two Hindus were also killed in separate incidents, police said.
The demining accident followed an earlier incident in which a member of India’s Border Security Force (BSF) was injured when he stepped on a landmine in Pinglish village, about 40 kilometers south of Srinagar. Police said the trooper was part of the BSF’s foot patrol. Minutes later, the patrol found another mine planted nearby, along a road used routinely by Indian troops.
The BSF and police reinforcements immediately sealed off the area and called in the police bomb disposal unit. However, the mine exploded when members of the unit tried to defuse it.
In another incident, two teenaged school children were killed and another injured in a mine blast at a private school in the Thanamandi area of the border district of Rajouri, 190 km west of Jammu. A police spokesman said that an improvised explosive device went off when children were playing in Rajdhani High School.
