By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Jun 14 2002 (IPS)

India on Friday accepted an offer from the United States to install ground sensors along the 700 kilometre-long Line of Control (LoC) to help monitor infiltration into Indian Kashmir, which Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has pledged to permanently end.

India’s new readiness to accept U.S. technical help is the most significant outcome of a visit to the sub-continent by U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld earlier in the week to encourage de-escalation of a military confrontation between the nuclear South Asian neighbours.

Rumsfeld met with Indian officials on Wednesday and Pakistani officials on Thursday.

But a day after Rumsfeld held talks in Islamabad on curbing extremism in Pakistan, a car bomb exploded outside the U.S. consulate in the southern city of Karachi, killing eight people, including the suspected suicide bomber and Pakistani police.

The explosion on Friday, which blew a hole in the consulate’s perimetre wall, was the second in Karachi in weeks, and highlighted Musharraf’s difficult task of reining in extremists.

Emerging from a meeting of the high-powered Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) chaired by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to assess the Rumsfeld visit, Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh told journalists the proposal to install sensors “is a matter to be discussed by the ministry of defence and the government of America”.

The two neighbours teetered on the brink of a nuclear exchange until Washington dispatched Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage to the sub-continent who extracted from Musharraf the promise of permanent cessation of cross-border infiltration into Kashmir by ‘jihadist’ groups based in Pakistan territory.

Armitage also got India to pull back part of its naval fleet from the Pakistan coast, restore overflights for Pakistani commercial aircraft and re-appoint a High Commissioner thereby considerably easing Rumsfeld’s mission in New Delhi and Islamabad.

However, Rumsfeld failed to dent India’s consistent policy that the Kashmir dispute, a legacy of the 1947 partition of the two countries on religious lines following independence from Britain, should be solved bilaterally by the two neighbours.

New Delhi also did not accept a role for U.S. troops in monitoring the LoC even if it is to apprehend members of the terrorist al-Qaeda network fleeing Afghanistan and into the northern parts of Pakistan adjoining Kashmir.

“I have seen indications that there are in fact Al Qaeda militants operating in the area near the Line of Control. I do not have evidence of precisely how many or where or when,” Rumsfeld said before flying off to Islamabad, where his statement did not go down too well.

In fact, Rumsfeld seemed to retract the statement by at a press conference in Islamabad where he said, “I do not have and the U.S. does not have, evidence of Al Qaeda in Kashmir. It tends to be speculative.”

But he maintained that the U.S. did have a “good deal of scraps of intelligence” and said he expected Islamabad to crack down on al-Qaeda terrorists and their network as soon as there was “actionable intelligence”.

Rumsfeld’s flip-flop typified recent visits to the sub-continent by a series of top ranking diplomats including one by British foreign secretary Jack Straw in the last week of May, in which great care was taken not to step on the sensibilities of the warring neighbours, especially those concerning Kashmir.

The visitors laid great emphasis on Pakistan’s cooperation with U.S. troops in apprehending the remnants of the Al Qaeda which are believed to be holing up in the Waziristan area of that country. But they also acknowledged Pakistan’s role in fomenting trouble in Indian Kashmir and prevailed on Musharraf to end it permanently.

To India’s satisfaction Rumsfeld also refused to acknowledge a plea from Pakistan foreign minister Abdul Sattar made at a press briefing on Thursday asking for “more help” from Washington in getting India to hasten de-escalation and in resolving the Kashmir issue by saying: “There is no magic wand.”

Rumsfeld made it clear that India pulling back some 700,000 troops deployed on the border depended on New Delhi’s satisfaction that cross- border infiltration had indeed ended and suggested that Islamabad consider an offer made by Prime Minister Vajpayee for joint-patrolling of the LoC by the two warring countries.

“Ultimately the two countries have to sort out their problems on their own,” Rumsfeld said and hinted subtly that he had an impression that Musharraf was “determined to seek de-escalation in tension.”

Sattar repeated the view of Musharraf who is away on a tour of Arab countries, seeking support for Pakistan’s cause, that India’s measures so far were “cosmetic” and not satisfactory.

“There is no change of Indian forces massed on our borders. Therefore there is no reduction of the threat,” Sattar said.

On Friday, in response to questions from journalists on whether there would be further measures towards de-escalation from India beyond what was announced before Rumsfeld’s visit, Jaswant Singh was non-committal. “The situation is pregnant with possibilities,” he said cryptically.

Singh was also emphatic that beyond the installation of sensors on the LoC with U.S. help there was “no proposal for any other forces from any other country other than Indian forces to be on the LoC,”

Earlier, India’s hawkish home minister L.K. Advani said the U.S. was free to patrol the Pakistan side of the LoC since that was where the infiltration was coming from.

He also did not budge from the Indian view that Pakistan needed to create a “conducive atmosphere” if dialogue was to begin between the two countries” but said India had already identified a diplomat to be named as the new High Commissioner in Islamabad.

India had withdrawn its High Commissioner Vijay Nambiar and downgraded its mission in Islamabad to that of a Deputy High Commission as part of diplomatic and economic measures against Pakistan following a “jihadist” attempt to blow up Indian Parliament last December.

Musharraf denied Pakistan’s involvement in the attack but India prepared to strike across the LoC at alleged training camps being run for “jihadist” groups in the part of Kashmir occupied by Pakistan since 1949.

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