Author: Amy Waldman
Publication: The New York Times
Date: January 7, 2004
They remain the ultimate odd couple,
the general and the poet, two leaders whose past interactions have been
marked by great expectations and even greater disappointments. But as they
posed for the cameras on Monday morning, their handshake firm and ungrudging,
it seemed to herald a new chapter in their relationship.
Gen. Pervez Musharraf, president
of Pakistan, and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India and senior
officials from both sides spent about an hour together on Monday taking
efforts to revive a dormant peace effort one step further. The meeting
came more than two years after their last session - at the Agra summit
meeting in July 2001 - broke down in bitterness.
Less publicly, but perhaps more
crucially, their underlings continued to lay the groundwork for what both
sides hope will be a sustained dialogue between the nuclear-armed nations,
who have fought three wars and two years ago nearly fought a fourth.
Niaz A. Naik, a former foreign secretary
for Pakistan, said the two sides had already agreed to restart a dialogue
and were simply working out when it would begin and at what level it would
take place. "They are trying to firm up, before Mr. Vajpayee leaves, the
procedural issues of how they will restart a dialogue," Mr. Naik said.
He said he believed that India wanted
one or two months - perhaps until the end of March - to allow Mr. Vajpayee
to bring the Indian public along with him. He said it was probable that
a substantive discussion of how to solve the two countries' dispute over
Kashmir would come later, perhaps after India's election, which could be
held as early as April.
Kashmir, a border region inhabited
mostly by Muslims, is at the core of the alienation between Hindu-majority
India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Each control a part if it.
Pakistan has long pushed for a dialogue
about the part of Kashmir controlled by India. But India first wants Pakistan
to end its support for an Islamic insurgency that has raged in the Indian-
controlled section since 1989.
Pakistan sees the militants fighting
in Kashmir as freedom fighters, but denies providing any material support.
India disputes that and says the militants are terrorists.
Officials disclosed little in the
wake of the meeting between Mr. Vajpayee and General Musharraf on the sidelines
of a regional summit meeting under way here, their discipline itself a
sign of the high stakes and the ongoing negotiations.
"Both leaders welcomed the recent
steps toward the normalization of relations between the two countries and
expressed the hope that the process will continue," Yashwant Sinha, India's
foreign minister, said at a news briefing.
All signs were that the process
was continuing. Laying the foundation stone for a residential complex at
the Indian High Commission here, Mr. Vajpayee called for dialogue to continue,
saying, "One should understand each other's problems and work together
to find a way out."
He seemed to call for increasing
the number of diplomats each country sends to the other. "New questions
have arisen," he said. "New answers are being sought."
After a meeting on Sunday between
the countries' foreign ministers, their foreign secretaries - the highest-level
civil servants for foreign affairs - met Monday morning.
More crucially, India's national
security adviser, Brajesh Mishra, met with Lt. Gen. Ehsan ul- Haq, director
general of Pakistan's powerful intelligence agency, and a Pakistani official
said they were to meet again on Tuesday.
Mr. Mishra also met with other "top
security officials," said Mr. Naik, who disclosed the first meeting on
Geo TV on Sunday night. He said that the two men had had a very good meeting
and that he believed that among the subjects they discussed were security
questions regarding the likely start of a bus service between Srinagar
and Muzaffarabad, the capitals of Indian- and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir,
and how to prevent militants from crossing what would become a soft border.
If, as is widely believed, India
is seeking a commitment from Pakistan to end support for militant activity
in Kashmir, few would be better placed to deliver on that commitment than
General Ehsan. Mr. Naik, however, said he thought India already had the
assurances it wanted. "I think they are fully convinced that Pakistan is
now determined to stop the traffic," he said.
The agency General Ehsan heads,
Inter-Services Intelligence, has backed the insurgency in Kashmir almost
since it began, helping to create and train some of the groups that fought
there.
Mr. Naik, who led back-channel negotiations
with India under Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, said there had been meetings
on "how to resume an interaction on the political issues, certainly including
Kashmir," and deliberations about the level at which they would take place.
"I understand the understanding
is that eventually" all three leaders - Mr. Vajpayee, Mr. Musharraf, and
Pakistan's prime minister, Mir Zafrullah Jamali - would be sitting together,
Mr. Naik said, adding, "This summit has to be carefully prepared."
The Pakistanis are eager for something
concrete to emerge from this week's summit meeting, and they were quick
to proclaim Monday that something would. Pakistan's information minister,
Sheik Rashid Ahmed, told Aaj Tak television on Monday that the two sides
were working toward a joint declaration.
"There are continuing differences
on the definition of terrorism and the perception of terrorism," Mr. Rashid
said, "but there has been headway in trying to resolve these issues."
The Indians are less hurried, and
were being far more circumspect. Declining to provide any more details
of the leaders' morning meeting or any other discussions, Mr. Sinha said,
"Anyone who at this stage says anything more is not doing any service to
the cause."
General Musharraf is under greater
pressure than Mr. Vajpayee to deliver something concrete, namely a dialogue,
quickly. Any indication that he was backpedaling on Kashmir by ending Pakistan's
proxy war would be highly unpopular here if he had nothing to show in return.
Mr. Naik said that after General
Musharraf's recent statement that Pakistan would be open to setting aside
its long-held insistence on a plebiscite for Kashmiris, the "Kashmiri people"
- Mr. Naik did not specify which ones - "were taken by surprise."
"President Musharraf spent three
hours with them trying to explain to them that it did not mean we are going
to abandon them or abandon the Kashmiri cause over there," Mr. Naik said.
