A top Indian official has said ongoing peace talks between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan were on course despite tardy progress in the negotiations that were stopped in January 2004.
The comments by National Security Advisor M. K. Narayanan came almost a month after the South Asian neighbors pledged to forge joint co-operation to combat terrorism and drug trafficking.
“There is some progress… progress has always been slow, it’s incremental but it’s not stopped,” Narayanan told the CNBC television station in an interview.
“One could always argue it could go faster but the point is that it has not stopped,” Narayanan, an advisor of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, said in the interview, the text of which was mailed to the press in advance.
Although the three-year-old peace process, begun by the previous Hindu Nationalist Government, led to more people-to-people contacts and the opening of cross-border road and rail transport services, however the core dispute over their separate claims on Kashmir remains unresolved.
But despite the dragging row over the Himalayan territory which both countries claim in full, Narayanan said talks would continue with Pakistan’s under-fire President Pervez Musharraf. “We are prepared to do business with” Musharraf, the National Security Adviser told CNBC.
India has often blamed bloody attacks on its soil on militant groups based in Pakistan. Last month the Indian army said it had noted an increase in militant infiltrations from the Pakistan side of Kashmir, the subject of two of the three wars between the neighbors since their independence from Britain in 1947.
Islamabad denies charges of arming and funding militants in Indian Kashmir who are fighting against New Delhi’s rule, and has said it has clamped down on insurgents in the area of Kashmir it controls.
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