NEW YORK—India and Pakistan have agreed to take steps to reduce tension on the disputed part of their border, in a much-anticipated meeting that senior officials said made advances in the tense relations between these nuclear-armed neighbors.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif met in New York on Sunday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. The talks went better than expected, officials from both sides said.
A series of deadly events in the weeks leading to the discussions had heightened tensions in the countries' already-fraught relationship.
Washington believes normalizing relations between India and Pakistan would help stabilize the region, as the hostility between the two countries feeds a detrimental competition for influence in Afghanistan. And Islamabad's concern over its eastern border with India prevents it from dealing with the al Qaeda-influenced militant groups that menace its northwest.
"There is clearly a desire from both sides to have a much better relationship," said India's national security adviser, Shivshankar Menon, briefing reporters after the meeting. "We have actually achieved a new stage; we do have some understanding on how to move forward."
Earlier
Pakistan Extends Olive Branch to India Mr. Sharif, who came to power in June and has a history of pursuing peace with India, had asked for the meeting.
For his part, Mr. Singh has a record of defying hawks at home to reach out to Pakistan. But how far he can go is limited by elections his party faces in India next year. Any supposed softness on Pakistan will be exploited by his conservative opponents.
In a speech Saturday at the U.N., Mr. Singh had accused Pakistan of "state-sponsored cross-border terrorism," aggressive language that Pakistani officials say shocked Mr. Sharif and led to pressure on him to pull out of the meeting. And Mr. Singh discussed alleged Pakistani-backed militant groups with President Barack Obama in Washington on Friday, to the annoyance of Islamabad, which wants to deal with the issue bilaterally.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Saturday, India's foreign minister, Salman Khurshid, said the Pakistani military was undermining its own elected prime minister's peace initiative by unleashing violence against India.
In his U.N. address Friday, Mr. Sharif called for a "new beginning" for Pakistan's relationship with India. He also called for the people of Kashmir to be allowed to decide their own future.
"The most important result of this meeting was that it produced a lowering of tensions," said Jalil Abbas Jilani, the top bureaucratic official at Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. "There is a willingness to address all our issues," he said. "Terrorism was certainly discussed. Terrorism is as much a concern for Pakistan as for India," the official added.
On Sunday, the two states agreed for their senior military officials to find a means to restore the cease-fire across their disputed border in the mountainous region of Kashmir and to find a mechanism to prevent hostilities breaking out there again.
There has been a regular exchange of fire on the Kashmir border in recent weeks, after five Indian soldiers were killed. Delhi says Pakistani military personnel slipped across the border in Kashmir and ambushed them, an allegation Islamabad denies.
Kashmir is claimed by both countries, with India holding most of that territory in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, while Pakistan holds about a third of Kashmir in its borders.
On Thursday, at least eight people were killed when suspected militants stormed a police station and army camp on the Indian side of Kashmir. An attempted bombing in early August of the Indian consulate in Jalalabad, eastern Afghanistan, is also blamed by Delhi on militants backed by Pakistan, which Pakistan denies.
India's Mr. Menon said Sunday's meeting, which lasted about an hour, dealt only with the immediate sources of discord, with progress on the broader relationship possible after those are dealt with.
He said India raised the issue of militants operating from Pakistan, especially the bringing to justice members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a jihadist group blamed by India for a 2008 attack on Mumbai in which 166 people were killed, including six Americans. Mr. Sharif promised the Pakistani court case against the alleged handlers of the Mumbai attackers would be pursued with more rigor, Mr. Menon said.
"If any meeting between India and Pakistan isn't a disaster, it counts as a success," said another Indian official. "It is step by step. We have 60 years of differences to overcome."
India believes the Pakistani military and its Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency "does not want to have good relations with India", Delhi's Foreign Minister, Mr. Khurshid, said on Saturday. "The Pakistani government must find ways of handling ISI and Pakistani army."
Islamabad has repeatedly denied that any arm of the government is supporting attacks against India, However, Pakistan's Mr. Sharif himself has said he was thrown out of power in a coup the previous time he was prime minister, in 1999, because of his peace moves with India, a view he repeated in New York on Friday in a speech to the Pakistani immigrant community.
Kashmir lies at the heart of tension between the two nations. Any comprehensive peace deal would need to settle the status of Kashmir, probably keeping the status quo that divides the area between the two countries.
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