Islamabad makes offer on Siachen

Pakistan has assured India that Pakistani forces will not seize a disputed glacier high in the Himalayas if Indian troops were to withdraw from it, a Pakistani newspaper said yesterday.

The assurance was given by Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf in his first face-to-face meeting with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New York on Friday, The News said, quoting unidentified sources. Singh had "positively responded" to the offer and modalities would be worked out later, the newspaper said.

Pakistani and Indian forces have been facing off in the icy wastes of the Siachen glacier, 5,500 metres above sea level in the north of the disputed Kashmir region for 20 years.

More soldiers die there of altitude sickness and frostbite than in fighting.

Pakistani foreign ministry officials in Islamabad said they could not confirm the report.

The two countries have discussed the Siachen dispute many times but India has been reluctant to vacate the peaks fearing that Pakistani troops at lower ground would move up and occupy the glacier.

The News also said the two leaders had agreed to restore a hotline set up between the Pakistani president and Indian prime minister 11 years ago but never used. The only regularly used hotline between the nuclear-armed rivals is between senior military officials.

Musharraf has described his meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as a major breakthrough.

Referring to the joint statement committing both sides to a negotiated settlement of Jammu and Kashmir, he has in an interview to Pakistan Television described Singh as a "sincere person" and the interaction as part of an "epoch-making day." The Musharraf's euphoria has been shared by the Pakistan media as well as the government. The News said a deal on Siachen is now in the making.

The newspaper said that a high-level delegation of Pakistani political leaders, led by a federal minister, will visit India to meet leaders of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference.

The News claimed that Manmohan Singh did not even in passing make any references to India's concerns about cross-border infiltration, although that is totally contrary to what the prime minister himself told reporters at a press conference after the meeting.

The report further said that the two leaders agreed that normalisation of relations was not possible without the peaceful solution of the Kashmir issue.

Manmohan Singh has been quoted as saying at his press conference in New York that India was sincere about finding solutions that would put the unhappy past behind.

The Pakistan government and the media across the board have been euphoric about the New York meeting.

Pakistan foreign office spokesman Masood Khan said the meeting had given a new direction to the composite dialogue process.

He said that the two leaders had rekindled the hope for a negotiated settlement of the Kashmir dispute and thus given a fresh lifeline to the whole dialogue process.

Pakistan's Information and Broadcasting Minister Shaikh Rashid Ahmad, who was part of Musharraf's official delegation to the US and is a known critic of Indian policies on Kashmir, has also expressed complete satisfaction over the results of the meeting.

The Dawn newspaper has noted, with optimism, that Pakistan has stopped demanding a settlement on the basis of the UN resolutions which are now outdated and cannot be implemented to the advantage of Pakistan and Kashmiris.

Sections of the Indian media, briefed by official sources, had failed to realise this reality and had instead claimed that the general's decision to drop references to the UN resolutions was a compromise.

India on its part had stopped harping on its earlier refrain of Kashmir being an integral part of India and had shown the courage to recognise that Kashmir was a dispute between the two countries which has to be resolved. The tone and tenor of Pakistani media reports centre around India's willingness to negotiate a settlement on Kashmir. This has been interpreted as a major step forward, and even a victory for Pakistan.

The fact that there is no mention of cross-border infiltration in the joint statement has been noted but not dwelt upon, with Kashmir remaining the focus. Pakistani newspapers, as well as participants in discussions on PTV, have taken care to add that it was imperative to involve representatives of Jammu and Kashmir in the talks.

It is they, after all, who should find a solution acceptable to them so that they can sell it to their people, Dawn has said.

- The Asian Age