NEW DELHI, 4 August 2004 — India and Pakistan opened talks yesterday to promote greater people-to-people contact, one of the rare successes in efforts to end decades of hostility between the nuclear-armed neighbors.
Relations at a popular level have warmed immensely this year after thousands of Indians traveled to Pakistan to watch their cricket team tour there, with many fans overwhelmed by the hospitality they received.
The two days of talks in New Delhi will aim to build on that goodwill, but analysts say progress may be slow because the two governments are still at odds over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.
Pakistan’s secretary for tourism and culture, Syed Jalil Abbas, and his Indian counterpart Neena Ranjan led the talks, held at a hotel in New Delhi, but no details were immediately available.
Besides Kashmir, the armies of India and Pakistan also face off on the Siachen Glacier, the world’s highest battlefield, and the two sides have other disputes over water and territory.
The two countries were both part of British colonial India but were divided into mainly Hindu India and Muslim-majority Pakistan when they got independence in 1947.
Many of their people share a common language and history, but ties have rarely been better than belligerent and they have gone to war three times.
“There is a great deal of yearning among the people of the two countries to see the other,” said Kalim Bahadur, who teaches foreign relations at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.
“There is a shared history that Pakistanis and Indians both want to visit and re-visit,” he said.
One of the items on the agenda at the talks will be the easing of visa restrictions that have kept apart the people of the two countries, including many whose families were separated by the 1947 partition.
Tourism officials will also look for ways to open up the nations to each other’s tourists, a process which had been discouraged until now. The two governments will also consider demands to allow more Hindus and Sikhs to visit shrines inside Pakistan and for Muslims to visit holy sites in India.
Officials speaking on condition of anonymity said the two sides held discussions on liberalizing current visa policies and providing multiple visas to journalists, academics and tourists. They also discussed holding book fairs and the screening of Bollywood films
The talks form part of a broader peace process between the neighbors that began last year.
Later this week, defense officials will discuss a 20-year-old stand-off on the Siachen Glacier, in the north of Kashmir, where the two armies are engaged in a high altitude stand-off.
Cartographers will also meet to discuss a dispute over maritime boundaries in the Arabian Sea.
Analysts said India and Pakistan were unlikely to announce dramatic measures on people-to-people cooperation or any other minor disputes, because ultimately they remained far apart on the 57-year-old dispute over Kashmir.
Wary of Indian stone-walling on Kashmir in the past, Islamabad is reluctant to restore friendly relations without signs of a deal over Kashmir and wants the two sides to at least set up a time-frame to resolve the dispute.
New Delhi controls the Kashmir Valley — the heart of the disputed territory. It says the entire peace process must not be held hostage to Kashmir, a dispute which they say cannot be solved in a few months.
“There is already a perceptible cooling-off because of the divergence on Kashmir,” said Bahadur. “They will take incremental steps in these talks; you cannot expect a major advance.”
