India, Pakistan map out peace plan

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Indian and Pakistani officials agreed yesterday to a "basic road map" for peace negotiations aimed at resolving their historic and often violent differences over Kashmir and other matters.

Wrapping up three days of talks, senior diplomats outlined a schedule for parallel negotiations on a range of subjects over the next five months, after which the Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers will meet to assess progress and decide on their next steps.

Talks on the status of Kashmir -- the divided Himalayan region claimed by India and Pakistan, both of which possess nuclear arms -- will start in May or June, after India holds national elections in April, officials said.

Other topics to be discussed at various levels and among different groups of specialists include nuclear security, water-sharing, maritime boundaries, trade relations, drug trafficking, and confidence-building measures to ease border tensions.

"We do have before us now a sort of a basic road map for a Pakistan-India peace process to which we have both agreed," Foreign Secretary Riaz Khokar of Pakistan said following a two-hour meeting with his Indian counterpart, Shashank, who uses just one name. "We hope this road map will eventually lead to the settlement of all outstanding disputes between India and Pakistan and in the direction of durable peace."

The announcement added to the sense of optimism and goodwill that has been building in South Asia since Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India and General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, agreed on Jan. 5 to resume peace talks after a gap of more than two years.

Indian officials had resisted such a move, accusing Pakistan of backing Islamic insurgents in the part of Kashmir that India controls, but relented after Musharraf agreed to a joint statement pledging that he "will not permit any territory under Pakistan's control to be used to support terrorism in any manner."

The challenge Musharraf faces in fulfilling that pledge was vividly demonstrated yesterday afternoon when the former leader of the banned Islamic guerrilla group Lashkar-e-Tayyba turned up in the heart of the capital to attend a public memorial service for an Islamic militant slain last month by Indian security forces in Kashmir.

"It's ironic that jihad has been labeled as terrorism and our Pakistani leaders are saying the same things that Western leaders are saying," Hafiz Mohammed Saeed told about 500 men in a park festooned with militant slogans such as "Beat infidels so harshly that they run away."

"Pakistani leaders are using their entire machinery to curb jihad, and this is the worst form of state terrorism," continued Saeed, a former engineering professor, who came late to the service in a van with tinted windows. "Jihad in Kashmir will continue at any cost, and Kashmiris will be freed one day."

Founded in 1989, Lashkar-e-Tayyba, or Army of the Righteous, is one of the main Pakistani militant groups fighting Indian forces in Kashmir. Some of its members trained in Afghanistan during the Taliban era and have been linked by US intelligence to Al Qaeda. India has identified the group as one of two that orchestrated a December 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament in New Delhi, which brought the two countries to the brink of their fourth war.

In January 2002, Musharraf banned the group, along with a number of others, but it has since reconstituted under a different name, Jamaat-u-Dawa, which organized yesterday's memorial service. Saeed spent several months under house arrest but was released early last year after a court ruled that the government had no grounds to continue holding him.

In an telephone interview last night from London, where he is traveling on official business, Interior Minister Faisel Saleh Hayat of Pakistan said Jamaat-u-Dawa has not been banned "because there is no credible substantive evidence that it is indulging in activities against the interest of Pakistan or using Pakistan as a base to harm the interest of people or governments or countries outside" Pakistan.

He added, however, that Jamaat-u-Dawa is on Pakistan's terrorism "watch list" and said he would inquire into the nature of Saeed's speech to determine whether any laws had been violated. "Obviously jihad in the strict Islamic sense is not violative of the law, but if it promotes violence, then anything in that context does call for the rule of law to come into force," he said.

Saeed's fiery words, in any case, were sharply at odds with the generally upbeat atmosphere around yesterday's announcement of a schedule for talks, some of which will begin next month. Indian and Pakistani diplomats used words such as "cordial" and "constructive" to describe this week's preparatory session, showing just how far the two governments have traveled since their armies faced each other across the border in 2002.

The warming trend began in April, when Vajpayee extended a "hand of friendship" to Pakistan during a speech in Kashmir and has accelerated with the restoration of transportation links and "people-to-people" exchanges involving trade delegations, politicians, and artists. At a private function in Karachi Tuesday night, a popular Indian singer, Jagjit Singh, entertained an audience of about 2,000 people, including a number of senior military officers, in a scene that would have been unimaginable as recently as six months ago.

But the two sides remain far apart on Kashmir, a mostly Muslim region that India claims as an integral part of its territory. And as yesterday's memorial service made clear, Musharraf faces fierce internal resistance to anything that smacks of compromise on what Pakistanis regard as the core issue in relations with India.