NEW DELHI (Islamweb & News Agencies) - Leaders of India and Pakistan are headed into another peace-seeking meeting this month but there are few signs either side is ready to bend on the decades-old dispute over Kashmir. (Read photo caption below)
The two nations have stepped up the rhetoric and separatist violence in Indian-administered Kashmir has escalated as Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf prepare for talks in New York later this month.
Indian foreign ministry spokeswoman Nirupama Rao told reporters the talks would be held on September 25 on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly session.
Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani on Wednesday blasted Islamabad for what he called its ``obsession'' with Kashmir.
Earlier, junior Foreign Minister Omar Abdullah said a stream of harsh statements from Islamabad had clouded prospects for the New York meeting.
BAD SIGNS
Vajpayee and Musharraf held two days of talks in the northern Indian town of Agra in July but the high-profile summit collapsed over Kashmir, the focus of a 54-year-old row between the neighbors.
Since then the two nuclear-capable neighbors have stuck to their positions with New Delhi insisting talks must be broad-based, and not just confined to Kashmir which it considers an integral part of the country.
Local media reports quoted Pakistani officials as saying Musharraf intended to raise the Kashmir issue in his speech at the U.N. General Assembly, a step bound to raise hackles in New Delhi.
``The signals from both capitals are not good at all,'' J.N. Dixit, a former Indian foreign secretary, told Reuters.
India has expressed concern at what it calls the mounting violence in Kashmir for which it holds Pakistan responsible.
Islamabad denies direct involvement in the Kashmir revolt, but says it offers moral and diplomatic support for what it calls the Kashmiri people's struggle for self-determination.
The two armies, locked in an eye-ball to eye-ball confrontation along a control line running through Kashmir, have also repeatedly exchanged fire in the past month.
PHOTO CAPTION:
Sikh soldiers put a shell into a mortar as they prepare to retaliate against Pakistan's shelling of the border areas in the Naushera sector of the strife-torn northern Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, September 6, 2001. India said that Pakistani troops fire artilery and small arms fire across the disputed Kashmir frontier to cover Muslim rebles crossing into the Himalayan state. REUTERS/Str