SOUTH-ASIA: Hopes Recede for Indo-Pakistan Dialogue in Summit

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jan 3 2002 (IPS) - Hopes for an Indo-Pakistan peace breakthrough at this week’s South Asian summit receded, after Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee declared Thursday that he was not satisfied with Islamabad’s latest actions against Pakistan-based ‘jihadist’ militants operating in this country.

Speaking to reporters at Lucknow city before leaving for the 11th summit of the seven-nation South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in Nepal, Vajpayee again ruled out talks with Pakistan President Gen. Pervez Musharraf in Kathmandu.

“It looks like Pakistan is not ready to let go of terrorism,” Vajpayee said, belying the hopes of those who viewed the Kathmandu summit as the perfect opportunity to defuse high tension between the neighbours, which have massed troops and armour along their 818 km border.

The tension, amid growing fears of a military conflict between the nuclear rivals, has caused concern in international capitals, including Washington.

“We hope that the two sides would see this (the Kathmandu summit) as an opportunity to make progress toward resolving their current differences and to lower tensions,” U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher was quoted saying in Washington earlier on Thursday.

Bilateral tensions have been provoked by an attempt by a suicide squad to blow up India’s Parliament House on Dec.13, an attack New Delhi blames on militant groups in disputed Kashmir that it says are backed by extremist groups in Pakistan.

Since then, India has demand that Pakistan stop supporting “terrorist groups” and hand over a list of individuals it wants extradited for various acts of terrorism.

“We have not had an official response from the Pakistan government to our demands,” Vajpayee said.

India’s Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh, already in Kathmandu for a meeting of South Asian foreign ministers ahead of the SAARC meeting, has expressed dissatisfaction with Pakistan’s claims to have reined in two terrorist organisations it has alleged were responsible for the Dec 13 attack.

“Temporary cosmetic steps won’t do. The touchstone of Indian policy is that Pakistan must stop sponsoring all kinds of terrorist activity on Indian Soil. A more vigorous crackdown on Pakistan-based terrorist outfits should be initiated,” Singh said.

The organisations named by India , the Lashkar e Toiba (Soldiers of God) and the Jaish-e-Mohammed (Army of Mohammed) were placed on the U.S. list of terrorist organisations before Islamabad moved in recent weeks and days to freeze their accounts and arrest their top leaders. But India called the arrests an eyewash.

Meantime, on Wednesday a grenade attack was made on the provincial assembly of Kashmir in Srinagar city, killing one policeman and injuring several other people.

Reacting to the Srinagar blasts, Boucher said the United States condemned them and continued to call for an end to violence in Kashmir, where attacks have dramatically increased since the United States declared its war on international terrorism in the wake of the Sep. 11 attack on Washington and New York.

An attack on the Srinagar assembly on Oct. 1 resulted in the deaths of some 50 people. The Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba claimed responsibility, vowing to carry out more deadly attacks not only in Kashmir but also in other parts of India.

The attempt to blow up Parliament House last month failed only because wires attached to explosives in a car bomb somehow got loose and the suicide squad which drove up in it was eliminated by police in an hour-long firefight vividly captured and broadcast by several television networks.

With a groundswell of public opinion building up in favour of drastic action, India late last month withdrew its high commissioner in Islamabad, halved mission strengths in each other’s countries, banned overflights of Pakistani aircraft over its territory and moved troops to forward positions on the border.

On Wednesday, India’s Defence Minister George Fernandes announced that India had completed positioning its troops along the Line of Control (LoC), which divides the Indian side of Kashmir from the Pakistan-held portion. Before leaving for Kathmandu, Vajpayee brushed aside suggestions that a military confrontation could spiral into a nuclear exchange. “We will not use atomic weapons for anything other than our own defence,” he said.

Vajpayee, however, also said that India would also use nuclear weapons against any country which does not possess them, ” referring to Pakistan’s rival nuclear weapons programme.

Soon after the Dec.13 attack, Vajpayee said India could not be expected to show the same restraint it did while repelling an armed intrusion across the LoC by operating strictly within Indian territory.

Musharraf responded to the suggestion that India would not now hesitate to cross the LoC by warning against “precipitous action” and invoking the fact that his country was armed with nuclear weapons as well.

Indian analysts have viewed with suspicion Musharraf’s plan to arrive in Kathmandu on Friday through Beijing and on board a Chinese aircraft. New Delhi has in the past accused China, with which it fought a bloody border war in 1962, of proliferating nuclear and missile technology to its close and long-standing ally Pakistan.

Indian news agencies quoted a foreign ministry spokesperson as saying in Beijing Wednesday: “Very recently, the Pakistani side told us that in view of the present India-Pakistan relations, Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf will like to proceed to the SAARC summit in Nepal through China.”

Shortly before Musharraf’s arrival in Beijing Thursday, China’s Xinhua news agency reported a joint call by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and China’s Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan for India and Pakistan to work for a diplomatic solution to the crisis.

“If the situation gets out of control and results in large- scale armed conflict, not only would India and Pakistan suffer, it would also influence the peace process in Afghanistan and endanger the stability and development of South Asia and in fact all of Asia,” Xinhua quoted Tang as saying.