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India-Pakistan Summit Struggles for a Final Resolution
AGRA, India, July 16 (News Agencies) - Indian and Pakistani officials struggled Monday to draft a mutually acceptable joint declaration that would seal a two-day summit between the leaders of the South Asian rivals.
A senior official connected to the talks said that the foreign ministers and foreign secretaries on both sides had been locked together for several hours.
"There are some important differences of opinion," said the official, on the condition of anonymity.
Following the two sessions that were held the day before, Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf held a round of one-on-one talks on Monday morning.
The summit broke a two-year freeze in official contacts and was dominated, as expected, by the bitter decades-old dispute over Kashmir.
The official confirmed that the issue of Kashmir was, in fact, the cause of the delay in the declaration.
Meanwhile, Vajpayee and Musharraf were ensconced in their respective hotels - with the Pakistani leader having cancelled his scheduled visit to a Sufi Muslim shrine in the northern Indian town of Ajmer.
Earlier in the day, Musharraf, appearing to have grasped the initiative from his hosts, issued a passionate appeal for India to accept that a resolution of the Kashmir dispute was the only progressive way towards ending more than 50 years of mutual hostility.
The nuclear-capable neighbors have fought three full-scale wars since the partition of the Indian sub-continent in 1947 - two of them over Kashmir, which is divided between the two countries and claimed by both.
"Let us not remain under any illusion that the main issue confronting us is Kashmir," the Pakistani military leader told a meeting of senior Indian newspaper editors just before his third-round summit with Vajpayee.
"I will carry on saying it whether anyone agrees or not, because this is what we have killed each other for," he added.
Musharraf accused India of ignoring reality by refusing to accept the Kashmir dispute as the core issue dividing the two sides saying, "I do not believe in living in a make-believe world. We must confront realities as they are, not brush them under the carpet or, like an ostrich, live in our own world."
At the same time, he insisted that he was willing to discuss all other issues of bilateral concern - as long as there was progress on Kashmir.
"I have fought two wars .… I've been in the front .... I know what it is when one fights," the general said.
"What I have learnt is... never close the door shut, ever, on diplomacy. We must always continue with this process of dialogue... which has been extremely fruitful."
The first day of summit talks, held on Sunday, have been described as "frank, cordial and constructive," with Vajpayee accepting an invitation to visit Pakistan later in the year.
Musharraf proposed that the summit - the first since a two-month border conflict in Kashmir in the summer of 1999 - be taken as the beginning of a three-step mechanism for improving relations.
"Step two is the acceptance of Kashmir as the main issue that must be resolved," Musharraf said.
Step three would be to look at all possible solutions to the Kashmir problem and agree on which ones could be mutually discarded as unworkable.
"Having done that, we would have come a little way and can go on to further discussions," he said.
India's heavy-handed military response to a Muslim separatist movement in Indian-held Kashmir, which New Delhi alleges is sponsored by Pakistan in the form of a "proxy war", has claimed at least 35,000 lives since its launch in 1989.
Pakistan, which puts the death toll at 70,000, denies the charges of "cross-border terrorism", but extends open moral and diplomatic support to what it describes as the Kashmiris' right to self-determination.
Police officials said on Monday that 31 people in Kashmir had been killed in fresh separatist-linked violence, pushing the death toll since the start of the Agra summit to more than 60.
Informed Pakistani sources said the draft joint declaration being fine-tuned by senior officials from both sides was a two-page document containing nine points.
While acknowledging Indian "compulsions" to broaden the focus away from Kashmir, Musharraf stressed that he and Pakistan were equally compelled to keep it as the core issue.
"If India expects I should ignore Kashmir then I had better buy back the Neharwali Haveli (his childhood home in Delhi) and stay there," he said.
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