India changes Pakistan approach

By John Chalmers and Tahir Ikram

NEW DELHI (Reuters): India's decision to ditch its cease-fire in Kashmir and invite Pakistani military ruler Pervez Musharraf for talks was a dramatic shift in tack to resolve a decades-long dispute with no end in sight.

But if Musharraf does travel to New Delhi for the first summit since the nuclear-capable neighbors stood on the brink of a full- blown conflict in 1999, there is no guarantee that peace can be clinched.

Analysts said Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee is likely to seek broad-based bilateral dialogue and a resolution based on the territorial status quo.

Musharraf will want a Kashmir-focused discussion of how to redraw the map as well as the involvement of Kashmiri separatists and -- as an arbiter -- the United States.

Pakistan-based militant groups, meanwhile, have rejected New Delhi's moves as a ploy and say their violent struggle against Indian rule in Kashmir will go on.

Ever since an undeclared war on the snow-capped slopes of Kargil in northern Kashmir two years ago, India has consistently refused to engage Pakistan in talks.

It insisted that Islamabad first had to stop "cross-border terrorism", a byword for Pakistani sponsorship of the insurgency in the state of Jammu and Kashmir which has claimed more than 30,000 lives since it took off in 1989.

Analysts said that old formula was glaringly absent from the statement New Delhi issued on Wednesday night.

"That's gone," said C. Raja Mohan, an Indian commentator on diplomatic affairs. "We're going back to the Lahore formulation."

The Lahore declaration, a wide-ranging document on issues from Kashmir to nuclear arms and bilateral trade, was signed in early 1999 when Vajpayee took the first journey of an India-Pakistan bus service.

"The problem now is going to be from the Pakistani side," said Mohan. "But if Musharraf says 'all this is fine, but we want only talks focused on Kashmir' he is changing the framework."

But why did Vajpayee change tack?

There had certainly been pressure from the U.S. for India to engage with Musharraf, whose role in the Kargil conflict left India with a deep sense of betrayal after the optimism of Lahore.

But the most compelling reasons came from within.

India's suspension of hostilities against militants in Jammu and Kashmir, which went into effect six months ago, had cut no ice with the guerrillas.

They stepped up their attacks, consolidated their positions and drove the security forces to retaliate, rendering the ceasefire meaningless.

"There was a sharp acceleration of violence so it was difficult to persist with the ceasefire," said Alexander Evans, a research associate of the Center for Defense Studies at King's College, London.

Analysts said Vajpayee came under pressure from his increasingly frustrated military to scrap the ceasefire.

There was also pressure from hardliners in his party and its Hindu nationalist affiliates, who have been flexing their muscles since a devastating corruption scandal and a feeble performance in state elections put Vajpayee on the back foot.

Vajpayee also had next to nothing to show for his parallel efforts to draw non-militant separatist groups into peace talks.

But by twinning the abandonment of the ceasefire with his call to Musharraf, Vajpayee salvaged his reputation as a statesman prepared to stray from the beaten track of Indian policy to find peace.

Mohan said Vajpayee had demonstrated this with his bus trip, and noted that a flurry of "back-channel diplomacy" which followed Lahore had -- according to one of the negotiators -- almost led to a Kashmir solution.

The secret diplomacy was crippled by the Kargil conflict and then buried when Musharraf staged a bloodless coup and took power later that year.

In Pakistan, though, there was caution over Vajpayee's offer.

"The ceasefire card did not work in Kashmir and this may have seemed a good idea to New Delhi," said Fehmida Ashraf, an Indian affairs analyst at the Institute of Strategic Studies, a government think-tank.

She said talks would be meaningless unless Kashmiri separatist groups were involved.

India has refused to consider three-way negotiations, which is why its offer of dialogue has been shunned by the separatist umbrella group, the All Parties Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference.

Tahir Amin, a Pakistani academic at Britain's Cambridge University, said he was worried about India's sincerity.

"We do not know what the Indian motives are," he said. "Maybe playing to the world gallery in terms of being more reasonable and maybe persuading the new U.S. administration to forge closer ties and further subdivide the resistance."

India has always resisted any U.S. involvement in Kashmir because Washington's Cold War tilt towards Pakistan made it suspicious that the United States would not be impartial.

But its relations with Washington are now blossoming.

"In terms of form, I don't think we can be seen as sitting at a table of three," said Mohan. "But in terms of a practical stratagem, mobilizing the U.S. influence to get a reasonable settlement with Pakistan, it's quite a smart thing to do."