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India, Pakistan agree to boost trade, trust
India and Pakistan agreed in "positive and businesslike" talks on Sunday to boost trade and trust to bolster peace efforts between the wary nuclear-armed neighbors.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh started the day by watching the first hour of a cricket match between their national teams.
As India slipped to defeat, angry fans threw water bottles at the Pakistani players and briefly halted the match. Musharraf and Singh generated a friendlier atmosphere at two hours of talks in the Indian capital.
Musharraf said the dialogue had been held with "a positive attitude and great optimism" and there had been progress on all issues.
Indian officials echoed those sentiments.
"I think the visit has gone well. I think both sides agree that the visit has gone well," Foreign Minister Natwar Singh told Reuters Television.
While Manmohan Singh's spokesman described the talks as "very positive" and "very businesslike," Indian Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran said the two leaders wanted to build a "common prosperity" through closer economic ties, and had agreed to revive a joint business council.
The nuclear-armed rivals also agreed on more transport links, decided to swiftly release each other's nationals who accidentally stray across the border and hold more talks to push through an ambitious gas pipeline from Iran to India through Pakistani territory.
They also moved to try and speed up efforts to resolve a military stand-off on the Siachen Glacier deep in the Himalayas in Kashmir, Saran said.
LITTLE PROGRESS OVER KASHMIR
However, the agreements were hardly pathbreaking, with many of them recycled from previous talks, and the sides reported little progress on their core dispute over Kashmir, where a 15-year revolt against Indian rule has killed tens of thousands.
Saran said Singh had reaffirmed that India would not agree to redrawing boundaries and had resisted the idea of setting a deadline to resolve the "complex" dispute.
But there was more agreement on the idea of bringing the people of divided Kashmir closer so that, in Saran's words, "the more complex problem could be addressed sometime in the future."
There was a willingness to make life easier for the people residing on both sides of the border in Kashmir, he said.
The most tangible sign of that came this month with the launch of the first bus service between Indian and Pakistani Kashmir in almost 60 years.
Kashmiri separatist politicians, who also held talks with Musharraf, were not satisfied. "We support the CBMs (confidence-building measures) ... but we believe that it is an incomplete process ... until Kashmiris are involved in it," said Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, head of the moderate group of Kashmir's main separatist political alliance. The Delhi talks came a day after Musharraf arrived in India "with a message of peace" on his first visit since a failed summit in 2001 and near war over Kashmir three years ago. Although the three-day visit was planned as an informal trip to watch the one-day cricket international between India and Pakistan, it ended up being less about the game and more about getting the sluggish peace process moving forward. Hours before the talks, Musharraf met Indian and Pakistani cricket players at Delhi's Ferozeshah Kotla stadium, located barely a mile from where he was born, before the teams got down to play the last game of their six-match one-day series. The crowd at the ground, estimated at 30,000, chanted "India, India" as Musharraf met the players and waved at the fans, who included some 2,000 Pakistanis. |
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