India, Pakistan PMs To Meet?

India's prime minister on Saturday indicated he'll meet the leaders of the country's bitter rival, Pakistan, on the sidelines of a summit of South Asian countries in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad.
But it remained unclear whether the leaders would hold bilateral talks on touchy issues, especially the Himalayan region of Kashmir, the main flash point between the two neighboring countries. Kashmir is divided between them, but claimed in entirety by both.

The three-day summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, or SAARC, begins Sunday.

"While in Islamabad, I will take the opportunity of bilateral meetings with other SAARC leaders, besides interacting with our hosts," India's Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said shortly before leaving New Delhi for Islamabad.

"I hope all discussions, bilateral and regional, would proceed in the spirit of friendship, cooperation and good neighborliness," he said.

Hours earlier, Vajpayee had said "there will be no bilateral talks in Islamabad." In their customary diplomatic tiptoeing, the two nuclear-armed countries, who've fought three wars, routinely make fine distinctions between terms such as "meetings" and "talks."

Officials on both sides have earlier indicated that there's virtually no chance of official talks on India-Pakistan relations, or on Kashmir.

There's been no official announcement, but Indian and Pakistani officials in Islamabad have said on condition of anonymity that Vajpayee and Pakistani Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali are all but certain to meet on the sidelines of the summit.

Any meeting between Vajpayee and Pakistan's top leader, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is unlikely to be confirmed before it happens. The two last met in India in July 2001.

Speculation about meetings between the rival leaders has been fueled by the arrival in Islamabad on Friday, a day ahead of schedule, of Brajesh Mishra, India's national security adviser and a close Vajpayee aide.

Any meeting between the rivals' top leaders would demonstrate an important new relaxation in historical hostilities.

Jamali was quoted as saying in Saturday's edition of the Pakistani newspaper The News that the countries had "moved from a dead-end."

Acrimony was deep at the last SAARC summit, held in Nepal in January 2002, when Vajpayee and Musharraf gingerly shook hands while a million of their troops faced each other across their border on war alert. A month earlier, the Indian parliament had been attacked - India blamed Pakistan-backed Islamic militants, a charge Pakistan denied.

Last year's SAARC summit was canceled amid lingering hostility. But relations have been gradually improving since April.

Pakistan is eager to hold direct talks with India to resolve the decades-old dispute over Kashmir and other issues. India says Pakistan must show it has stopped harboring Islamic militants, who attack Indian forces in India's portion of Kashmir, before negotiations can begin.