Musharraf Unhappy with Signals from India over Kashmir

Pakistan is “not encouraged” by the signals coming from India over their joint pledge to try solving their half-century dispute over Kashmir, President Pervez Musharraf has told AFP in an exclusive interview. He accused India of failing to show flexibility. “Certainly the vibes should be much better than this, that we are moving, that we want to…there ought to be a desire to move forward towards peace. “While (from) there we get vibes in the opposite direction, they do not encourage peace.” Musharraf was responding to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s rejection Wednesday of any redrawing of divided Kashmir’s boundaries, an option he floated last month for debate within Pakistan. Musharraf, stating he saw “light at the end of the tunnel,” suggested October 25 that parts of Kashmir, currently divided between Pakistan and India and claimed by both, be demilitarised and either placed under United Nations mandate, joint control or given independence. His suggestions came after talks with Singh in September in New York, where they discussed options for moving forward a peace dialogue started earlier this year. Their competing claims for Kashmir have triggered two of their three wars. Singh, visiting the Indian-ruled half of the Himalayan territory as Indian troops began the first phase of a pullout Wednesday, said any further division of Kashmir was unacceptable. “Any redrawing of the international border is not acceptable to us. Any proposal which smacks of further division is not going to be acceptable to us,” Singh said in Srinagar. On the same day Singh said further troop pullouts were possible if violence was curtailed in the Muslim-majority state, where over 40,000 people have been killed in an anti-India insurgency since 1989. Full Story