Musharraf Arrives in Agra for Indo-Pakistan SummitPakistan President Pervez Musharraf arrived here Sunday morning for a landmark summit meeting with Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the first between the two leaders since they came to power almost at the same time in October 1999.Musharraf flew in here at 9.50 am local time by a special Boeing 737 plane from New Delhi, India's capital some 200 km northwest of here, and the meeting began later at round 11.30 a.m. Soon after his arrival early Saturday morning in New Delhi, the president was accorded a welcome by Indian President Kocheril Raman Narayanan and Vajpayee, who reached here around midnight on Saturday. The two leaders are scheduled to hold what was described as wide-range discussions at Jaypee Palace Hotel here, where the Indian Prime Minister is staying. A senior Indian government official said the two sides would discuss whatever issues of their concern or they think important for the improvement of relations between the two neighbors during their ice-breaking meeting, which is expected to last for more than four hours. The summit was not a agenda-fixed and only Musharraf and Vajpayee know the topics they would discuss during their one-to- one meeting, said A. K.Sen Gupta, Senior Additional Principal Information Officer under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. In a banquet speech 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." However, it is unlikely to achieve any breakthrough on Kashmir, the core and sensitive issue between the two countries, during the summit, another Indian official said, adding that one could not expect any tentative result on Kashmir, which was left over by history. The meeting itself was an ice-breaking and it would be a beginning of normalization of relations between the two countries, which saw four wars on Kashmir, including the one in Kargil of Kashmir in 1999. |
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