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Indian, Pakistan Leaders Start Summit Talks
Visiting Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee are holding their first summit talks here Sunday morning in a bid to find possible solutions to disputes between the two neighbors.
The landmark one-to-one meeting, which began at around 11.30 a. m. local time and was originally scheduled for 15 to 30 minutes, had lasted for 80 minutes before lunch, official sources here said.
Musharraf, who arrived in India early Saturday morning, flew in here at 9.50 a.m. local time by a special Boeing 737 plane from New Delhi, India's capital some 200 km northwest of here.
This is the first meeting between Musharraf and Vajpayee since they came to power almost at the same time in October 1999.
Soon after setting his foot on India's land, Musharraf was accorded a welcome by President Kocheril Raman Narayanan and Vajpayee, who reached here around midnight on Saturday.
The talks between the two leaders were significant in the context of armed conflicts in Kashmir and the nuclear tests in both countries in May 1998.
A senior Indian official said earlier that the two sides would discuss whatever issues of their concern or they think are important for the improvement of bilateral relations during this ice-breaking meeting, which will be followed by delegation-level discussions.
"The summit does not have a fixed agenda and only Musharraf and Vajpayee know the topics they are discussing," said A. K. Sen Gupta, Senior Additional Principal Information Officer under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.
In a banquet speech on Saturday in New Delhi, Musharraf said the legacy of the past years was not a happy one and "we must not allow the past to dictate the future."
Asked about possible result specially on Kashmir during the talks, the official said "everything is possible." But he quickly added that the meeting itself was an ice-breaking move and it would be a beginning of normalization of relations between the two countries, which were dragged into two wars and a major military conflict in 1999 for Kashmir.
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