Key India-Pakistan Meeting

Building on momentum toward better relations after a half-century of venom, Pakistan's President Gen. Pervez Musharraf held much-anticipated, face-to-face talks Monday with Indian leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee on the sidelines of a South Asian summit.

The talks were seen as a milestone toward increasing confidence for a rapprochement, two years after their armies stood on the brink of war. The Times of India said the encounter "appeared to be a breakthrough meeting."

The meeting lasted 1 hour, five minutes. The two men shook hands and were joined during the talks by foreign affairs and national security aides.

"This meeting was held in a cordial manner and ended on a positive note," Pakistan Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told The Associated Press. "All issues were discussed openly. Their discussion was firm and comprehensive."

Both sides were working on a declaration, Ahmed said. It had not been released several hours later.

But Indian Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha appeared irritated in comments to reporters that even that much detail had been divulged, refusing to elaborate on "speculation" over what he termed "sensitive issues."

"Both leaders welcomed recent steps toward normalization of relations between the two countries and expressed hope that the process will continue," Sinha said. "Anyone who at this stage says any more will not be doing any service to either side."

Indian and Pakistani officials had worked behind the scenes for days to ensure that the meeting went ahead and billed it as a diplomatic courtesy call to dampen expectations of any major breakthrough, especially on the bitter territorial standoff over Kashmir, flashpoint of two wars since the countries achieved independence from Britain in 1947.

Just before the meeting, Vajpayee laid a foundation stone at the Indian chancery and told reporters that the two countries have to keep on talking with each other.

"New questions have come up and new answers are being sought," Vajpayee said. "The two sides have to realize each other's problems and we have to find a way out together. ... Good relations with Pakistan are a big responsibility."

Musharraf, who survived two assassination attempts last month, shook hands with Vajpayee before they sat down for their talks at the heavily guarded President House in Islamabad. The capital has been under a virtual lockdown, with some 10,000 police and commandos deployed in the streets during the three-day summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation.

The meeting comes on the second day of the seven-nation summit, a multilateral venue on regional issues that has given the two heavyweights cover to hold the first direct talks between their leaders in two years. The other nations at the summit are Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and Maldives.

The leaders had an informal meeting Monday hosted by Pakistani Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali. But Maldives President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom returned home early to his tiny island nation in the Indian Ocean because of a pre-standing commitment, Pakistani Foreign Ministry officials said.

At the opening session Sunday, Vajpayee met warmly with Jamali. But the meeting with Musharraf, the army chief who came to power in a military coup in 1999 and the country's main power broker, was considered more significant.

The men last met in Agra, India, in July 2001 but failed to make any headway on the Himalayan territory of Kashmir, a mostly Muslim province that is divided between the two countries but claimed by both in its entirety. India accuses Pakistan of infiltrating Islamic militants across the frontier in Kashmir to attack Indian forces.

Relations plummeted to the brink of war, with the two countries massing 1 million troops along their borders, after militants fighting in Kashmir staged a suicide attack Dec. 13, 2001, against India's Parliament in New Delhi. The standoff raised fears of a war at the same time U.S.-led forces were rooting out the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan.

Since April, both sides have ratcheted down the tensions, observing a cease-fire in Kashmir and restoring full diplomatic relation and transportation links.

The stakes in any conflict between the two have been raised since each tested nuclear weapons in 1998.

An Islamic militant chief fighting against Indian rule in Kashmir denounced the South Asian summit as a "failed organization" because it failed to deal with Kashmir's reality.

Syed Salahuddin, the head of Hezb-ul Mujahedeen, a militant group fighting Indian troops in its part of Kashmir, said the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation has "assumed the shape of a failed organization."

"The reason for this failure is that SAARC wants to create an unrealistically optimistic environment by pushing the realities of history and those on the ground into the background," Salahuddin said in a written statement from Muzaffarabad, capital of the Pakistan-controlled portion of Kashmir.

Hezb-ul Mujahedeen is the largest of about a dozen Islamic militant groups in Kashmir.

More than 65,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in an insurgency fomented by Islamic militants in the Indian portion of Kashmir since 1989.