ISLAMABAD, 20 December 2003 — President Pervez Musharraf is ready to offer alternatives to Islamabad’s life-long demand that Kashmir residents be allowed to choose rule by India or Pakistan, Information Minister Sheikh Rashid said yesterday, indicating a landmark shift in Islamabad’s policy.
“He’s not dropping the call for plebiscite,” Rashid told AFP. “He’s saying that we can think of certain other things, we have some alternative proposals. He’s prepared to offer some alternatives.”
While it is not clear that Musharraf has committed to abandoning referendum demands, the offer to negotiate on the key platform of Islamabad’s Kashmir policy could mark a turning point in relations between Pakistan and India.
It comes just weeks ahead of Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s visit for a regional South Asian summit from Jan. 4-6.
The minister declined to outline the “alternative proposals”, saying only that Musharraf would raise them with Indian leaders when “serious talks” are held.
“He has them in his mind, when there’s serious talks he will talk,” Rashid said.
India welcomed Pakistan’s surprise offer. Indian Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha, in New Delhi’s first reaction to Islamabad’s offer, said his government would always be ready to accept any change in the Pakistani position that a plebiscite in Kashmir was the only way out of the thorny dispute that has plagued relations between the neighbors.
“We have always suggested flexibility,” Sinha told reporters in New Delhi yesterday after a Cabinet meeting on security.
“It is Pakistan which has been rigid, it is Pakistan which talks about the centrality of the issue. So if there is any change or modification in the Pakistani position, that’s something which India will always be ready to welcome.” Pakistan has demanded since 1948 — a year after it was carved out of India in the partition of the subcontinent — that Kashmiris be allowed to choose between rule by Pakistan or India.
The demand for a plebiscite has been backed by the United Nations Security Council in several resolutions since 1948 but rejected by India.
Musharraf’s apparent offer to negotiate on the plebiscite demand, first carried in an interview published and broadcast Thursday, won applause in Washington.
“We think it is constructive to relinquish the demand for a referendum on the status of Kashmir,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.
Analysts had mixed interpretations of Musharraf’s comments. Kamal Matinuddin, former diplomat and chairman of the Institute of Strategic Studies, said there was nothing new in them.
“It is linked to what he has already said toward improving relations between the two countries. I know his views, he is not going to give up Kashmir and he is not saying that the UN resolutions are not valid now,” he told AFP.
“What he is saying is, ‘Let us begin talks, you bring your proposals and we bring our proposals and let us see what is acceptable to both sides’.”
The nuclear-armed rivals have been at loggerheads over Kashmir’s sovereignty for 56 years, fighting two wars over it and coming close to a third war in 2002.
India has refused Pakistan’s calls for dialogue since the last talks failed in Agra in July 2001. It has set as precondition an end to the flow of rebels from Pakistani territory into the Indian-ruled zone of Kashmir.
Hopes have been rising for a permanent easing of tensions between India and Pakistan since a cease-fire in Kashmir came into effect on Nov. 26.
