India offers to hold peace talks with Pakistan
India offers to hold peace talks with Pakistan
DRAS, India (AP): India offered on Tuesday to hold high-level peace talks with Pakistan this weekend, a move that came even as its warplanes and troops struck against the hundreds of fighters India says Pakistan has sent into the mountains of Kashmir.
A Foreign Ministry statement said Pakistan's foreign minister would be welcome on Saturday, countering a proposal by Islamabad for Sartaj Aziz to come to New Delhi on Monday, which India called "inconvenient."
India's Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh was due to leave for China on Sunday, leaving little time for discussions with his Pakistani counterpart.
In Islamabad, Pakistan's Information Minister Mushahid Hussein told the upper house of parliament of India's offer. He did not say if Pakistan would accept the date, the same day the government announces its budget for 1999-2000.
Meanwhile, fighting raged on the battlefield in the Himalayan mountains. Pakistani artillery shells thudded into Dras and Kargil, the two forward bases from where Indian commanders directed an offensive against what India claims are Pakistan army soldiers attempting to capture Indian territory.
Pakistan denies its troops are involved and says the fighters are secessionist Kashmiri rebels from India.
Shells hit a television tower in Dras and fell around the highway on which the Indian army was moving reinforcements and new equipment, including antiaircraft guns and rocket launchers.
Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, in a televised speech to the nation Monday, accused Pakistan of sending its soldiers across the cease-fire line "to occupy our territory" in Indian-held Kashmir.
Hussein, the Pakistani minister, dismissed India's allegations and said Vajpayee's speech was for "home consumption." Pakistan earlier accused India of going "on the warpath" by spurning its earlier offer of talks.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars, two of them over control of Kashmir, since they won independence from Britain in 1947. India controls two-thirds of Kashmir and Pakistan the remaining one-third.
Vajpayee made clear the talks would be confined to ending the confrontation on India's northern frontier and not other issues diving the two rivals.
"The subject is one and one alone: the intrusion and how Pakistan proposes to undo it," Vajpayee said.
Western nations have asked the two new nuclear powers to show restraint, fearing the fighting may escalate into a full-scale war.
The induction of new weapons and 2,000 new soldiers to the battle zone appeared to be the prelude of an all-out assault by India to push the intruders off the snow-peaked mountains they have occupied since early May.
The army canceled an escorted convoy of journalists from Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir, into the area.
In New Delhi, the National Security Council, a body of strategic experts and defense officials met to discuss the latest fighting. No details of the meeting were available.
India's casualty toll stood at 60 dead, 217 wounded and 14 missing since early May. The military says 221 Pakistani soldiers and an unknown number of others have also been killed so far in air and ground strikes around Kargil.
The fighting is taking place 700 kilometers north of New Delhi, the Indian capital.
In his address, Vajpayee demanded Pakistan remove the guerrilla fighters or have Indian troops evict them forcibly. "It is our duty to rid our Motherland of every single intruder," he said.
In an op-ed article in The New York Times on Tuesday, former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto urged that the Kashmir border be demilitarized and that residents be allowed to cross freely. She also suggested that the border could be patrolled by a joint Indian-Pakistani force or by international peacekeepers.
However, Bhutto has no political influence on Pakistan's current government.