ISLAMABAD, 8 June 2005 — Leaders from Indian Kashmir met Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf yesterday for two hours and discussed the issue that has bedeviled relations between India and Pakistan for over five decades.
The leaders from the All Parties Hurriyat Conference said they expect Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to invite them for talks once they return home.
Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, chairman of the moderate faction of the Hurriyat Conference, said India’s decision to allow himself and eight other separatist leaders to cross Kashmir’s cease-fire line for talks in Islamabad showed which way New Delhi was leaning. At a luncheon hosted by Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry, Farooq was asked whether he expected the Indian premier to call the Hurriyat leaders for talks.
“Oh, definitely,” Farooq said, adding that India clearly wanted to address the issue.
“The fact that we are sitting here today in Islamabad is a tacit recognition of the fact that the government of India does realize that until the people of Kashmir are satisfied there cannot be permanent peace in Kashmir.”
The separatists arrived last Thursday, coming on the bus route between Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian Kashmir, and Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan’s portion of the Himalayan region. The bus route, started in early April, is the most tangible result of a peace process Musharraf and Manmohan now describe as “irreversible”.
“Let’s hope the government of India is interested in taking the dialogue process forward,” Farooq said, explaining that mechanisms needed to be established to involve all interested parties. Hurriyat’s moderates want a united and autonomous Kashmir. Two of the three wars India and Pakistan have fought since partition of the subcontinent in 1947 have been over Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state. They almost went to war again in 2002, this time armed with nuclear weapons.
A hard-line faction of Hurriyat refused to make the trip to Pakistan in protest over what they see as a sell-out by Musharraf. Militant allies of the hard-liners have been fighting for all of Kashmir to belong to Pakistan.
Musharraf wants them to be part of the dialogue. He sees the Kashmir dispute being resolved through demilitarization of those areas in Indian Kashmir where the conflict has been centered, and the establishment of a soft border for the Kashmiris, along with some form of self-governance, albeit with oversight from New Delhi and Islamabad.
In a separate meeting earlier with Indian Petroleum Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar Musharraf called for the speedy launch of the proposed Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project to cater for the South Asian neighbors’ growing energy needs.
“The sooner the arrangements are made, the better,” Musharraf told Aiyar, who called on him at the end of two days of talks on the $4.5 billion project with Pakistani officials. During the talks, Pakistan and India agreed to accelerate technical work on the 2,600-kilometer overland project from early next year.
— With input from Agencies
