Pakistan has offered to drop a 50-year-old demand for a UN-mandated plebiscite over divided Kashmir and meet India "halfway" in a bid for peace on the subcontinent.
In an interview less than three weeks before the South Asian summit, President Pervez Musharraf late on Wednesday said he was prepared to be "bold and flexible" in an attempt to resolve the dispute over Kashmir. "If we want to resolve this issue, both sides need to talk to each other with flexibility, coming beyond stated positions, meeting halfway somewhere," he said. "We are prepared to rise to the occasion; India has to be flexible also."
| There's the gauntlet for India. I'm floored. Hafiz Saeed is probably taking the gaspipe at the moment... |
For more than 50 years, Pakistan has insisted on a plebiscite to allow people in the divided Himalayan region of Kashmir to decide between joining India or Pakistan, a position backed by a series of United Nations Security Council resolutions in the late 1940s.
| But not one for "Azad Kashmir," which has by now been thoroughly "Pakistanized." |
"We are for United Nations Security Council resolutions," Musharraf said. "However, now we have left that aside." Musharraf refused to be drawn on how to settle the Kashmir dispute, but said any solution must be acceptable to Kashmiris. And he warned India his flexibility should not be seen as weakness. "I'll be bold in moving it forward, but if somebody thinks I'll be bold to give up - no sir, I'm not giving up at all," he said. |