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Indian Official Says Pakistan Will Never Have Kashmir
SRINAGAR, Indian-held Kashmir, Sept 2 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Indian Finance Minister Yaswant Sinha vowed Sunday that India will never allow Pakistan to gain control of Indian-held Kashmir, news agencies reported.
"If their [the Pakistani's] eyes are on our state, then they should forget it," he warned in Kashmir's summer capital, Srinagar.
"Pakistani designs can not succeed in Kashmir," Agence France-Presse (AFP) quoted Sinha as telling Kashmiris who had gathered for the inauguration of the corporate headquarters of the Jammu and Kashmir Bank.
Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan and claimed by both. Two of the three wars between the two countries since 1947 have been over the disputed territory.
But Sinha also claimed that India wanted good relations with Pakistan and urged Islamabad to negotiate with New Delhi in what he described as "a constructive way."
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's July summit in Agra failed to produce a joint declaration, due to what Pakistanis said was Indian obduracy over the issue of Kashmir.
Pakistan blamed India for the breakdown, insisting that hardliners in India's Hindu nationalist-led government had spiked an initial draft agreed to by the two leaders.
But the Indian Finance Minister pinned the blame for the failed summit on Pakistan, accusing it of lack of reasoning.
"Pakistan should see reason and negotiate," Sinha warned, adding that, "then only we can find solutions to the problems."
"The biggest challenge in front of both of us [India and Pakistan] is poverty, and trying to pull out the people from it," Sinha said.
"It is difficult for them [Pakistanis] to come out [of poverty] given the route they have chosen," he was quoted by AFP as saying, apparently referring to the struggle for independence in Kashmir - which India claims is allegedly funded and armed by Pakistan.
Islamabad denies the Indian accusation and says it only gives moral and diplomatic support to the Kashmiris' struggle for independence from India.
In a clear warning to Pakistan, Sinha said, "The prime minister told Musharraf that we don't lack will power, nor strength," AFP reported.
Earlier, Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah said his government's "fight for autonomy" with New Delhi would continue, AFP added.
Abdullah also said the ruling National Conference party passed a resolution in the state assembly last year urging greater autonomy for the region, except in the matter of defense, finance, and communications.
The Indian finance minister's visit came as a ten-year-old Muslim boy was killed and four other Muslims were injured Saturday in Srinagar when Indian police opened fire to disperse an anti-government demonstration in Kashmir, witnesses said.
Indian security forces killed the boy as more than 3,000 men, women and children gathered to protest the government's failure to install a new power transformer in the northern village of Tappar in the Baramulla district.
"The cops had to open fire in self-defense, killing a boy, Shabir Ahmed, and injuring four others," a Baramulla police spokesman said.
Witnesses, however, said the police opened fire without provocation, AFP reported.
Indian security forces have killed more than 250 Muslim resistance activists in the Poonch and Rajouri districts over the past two months.
Overnight, police killed five Muslim activists in the Nowshera region in southern Kashmir's Rajouri district, a police spokesman said.
Police said four more activists were shot dead by security forces along the Line of Control (LoC) - the de facto border that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan - at Sonapindi in the northern Kupwara district.
Another activist died in a fierce encounter with the security forces in the same district, police said.
Some 70,000 people have died since 1989 when a Kashmiri uprising initiated.
Also, Indian police arrested a senior leader of Kashmir's main political alliance on Saturday as he visited a sick relative in a hospital.
A police spokesman said Sheikh Aziz, the chairman of the pro-Pakistan People's League party - which is part of the All Party Hurriyat Conference (APHC) alliance - had been taken to a police station in Srinagar, but failed to give a reason for his arrest, AFP reported.
Aziz's arrest followed a local newspaper report that claimed New Delhi planned to arrest all resistance leaders in Kashmir.
The APHC condemned the arrest and demanded Aziz's immediate release.
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