India and Pakistan agree historic travel link
India’s foreign minister met with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf today amid hopes the two sides could iron out an agreement to start a historic bus service between the capitals of divided Kashmir, the Himalayan province at the heart of decades of disagreement.
Pakistan’s Geo Television reported a much-anticipated deal on the bus service had been reached, though a senior Foreign Ministry official said more negotiations were needed.
Indian Foreign Minister Natwar Singh met with Musharraf in Rawalpindi, a city near the capital Islamabad where the Pakistani leader has his office.
Also on the agenda were discussions about a £1.5bn, 1,600-mile gas pipeline from Iran that has been delayed for years, mainly because of Indian security concerns over running the pipeline through Pakistani territory.
In a boost for the project, India’s Cabinet recently approved talks with Pakistan and other countries on such pipelines to help satisfy India’s burgeoning energy demands.
Singh – who arrived in Pakistan yesterday from neighbouring Afghanistan – was scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz later today before official negotiations with his counterpart, Khursheed Kasuri.
It is the first bilateral visit by an Indian foreign minister to Pakistan since 1989 and is part of a dialogue begun early last year to bury decades of hatred between the South Asian nuclear-armed rivals.
After touching down in Islamabad, Singh told reporters that “substantial progress” had been made in the bilateral relationship, and his visit would “provide further impetus to the present India-Pakistan process.”
“We are looking at additional transportation links between us,” he said.
Indian newspapers say India and Pakistan have overcome differences over travel documents that would be issued to passengers on the proposed bus service between the capitals of Indian- and Pakistani-held Kashmir.
That would pave the way for the first direct road link between the two portions of Kashmir since the bitter dispute over the Himalayan region took root when India and Pakistan achieved independence from Britain in 1947.
It would also cheer thousands of families divided by the military Line of Control that now divides Kashmir.
Analysts say the bus service would be a significant confidence-building measure for the peace process, which has made no headway in the countries’ competing territorial claims to Kashmir – the cause of two of their three wars since independence.
Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan said yesterday that the level of confidence-building between the two had been “very fast” but there was yet to be a ”tangible beginning” of a resolution of the Kashmir dispute.
Other irritants persist. Last month, Pakistan sought World Bank arbitration over a dam India is building in its portion of Kashmir.
Pakistan fears the dam will deprive farmers of water in the Punjab, its main agricultural province.
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