Kashmir

NEW DELHI, India - Three suspected Islamic militants killed at least 30 people, including women and children, in an attack yesterday on a bus and an army camp in Kashmir, the Indian army said. The attack coincided with a visit to New Delhi by a U.S. official on a mission to defuse the tensions that have lingered between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan. And it came a day after India's defense minister, George Fernandes, said in an interview that India had no plans to begin a military attack over the next few months against Pakistan, even if severely provoked.

NEVER was the need for a comprehensive settlement of disputes between India and Pakistan more apparent than in the air warfare over their border where a marshland called the Great Rann of Kutch meets the Arabian Sea, just below the Indus River delta. On Tuesday, India downed a Pakistani surveillance plane, killing 16, in disputed air space. On Wednesday, Pakistan fired a missile at Indian planes as they escorted helicopters carrying journalists to see the site. This could escalate into nuclear warfare.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, pledged yesterday that his country would not be used as a base for terrorism of any kind and announced a broad ban on militant groups accused of fomenting violence in Indian-held Kashmir, as well as at home. "No organization will be allowed to perpetuate terrorism behind the garb of the Kashmiri cause," Musharraf said in an hourlong televised address. "We will take strict action against any Pakistani who is involved in terrorism inside the country or abroad."

NEW DELHI, India - India proposed seven steps to improve ties across the heavily fortified front line dividing Kashmir yesterday as Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf made his first visit here since a bitter summit four years ago. Musharraf is set to hold talks on the Kashmir dispute and other issues with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today after attending a cricket match between India and Pakistan in the Indian capital. The Indian proposals include setting up several meeting points along the divide to reunite families, increasing bus service and communication links, renewing trade and taking steps to promote tourism in the long-disputed territory.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - After four days of increasingly heavy artillery duels, Pakistan made a bid to defuse its deadly standoff with India yesterday by calling for the placement of international monitors on the border in the disputed Kashmir region. The offer, made at a news briefing by Foreign Ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmed Khan, came amid renewed denials of Indian charges that Pakistan has allowed separatist rebels to infiltrate the Indian-occupied portion of Kashmir, where there has been a sharp upsurge in attacks by Islamic militants seeking to wrest the Himalayan region from Indian control.

NEW DELHI, India - A senior Indian official said yesterday that a "promising process" had begun to diminish the military crisis with Pakistan and could lead to Indian responses to reduce tensions within days. The official credited Pakistan's military ruler with ordering a halt to the infiltration of Islamic militants into Indian Kashmir - and said those orders are being obeyed. That begins to fulfill the most important condition India had set for stepping back from the brink of nuclear war. A top State Department official who visited Pakistan and India last week agreed yesterday that tensions were being reduced.

NEW DELHI - A new government in the Indian-governed portion of Kashmir was sworn in yesterday, signaling the start of what many hope could be a more peaceful era in the troubled state. However, the day was marred by a series of attacks by militants, including one on the new chief minister's house. Jammu and Kashmir, India's only Muslim majority state, has been the site of a 13-year, Pakistan-backed insurgency against Indian rule in the state. But the defeat last month of the state's governing party, a family dynasty that had shaped its politics for more than 50 years, is seen as a window through which a negotiated end to the conflict could enter.

NEW DELHI, India - Amid fresh shelling along the India-Pakistan border and a steady exodus of foreigners fearing a war, the leaders of the two countries departed for a regional security summit yesterday with little chance that they will meet to talk peace. Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said "there is no such plan" for him to meet with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf at a summit of Central Asian leaders in Almaty, Kazakhstan, that begins today. Russian President Vladimir V. Putin plans to meet separately with Vajpayee and Musharraf at the summit of 16 countries and hopes to persuade them to talk.

CALLS ON PAKISTAN to end its support of terrorism in India's portion of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir are reasonable and just. That is not the same as dropping the arguments over Kashmir's status. Pervez Musharraf, the unelected military president of Pakistan, may have welcomed U.S. pressure to join the war on terrorism in Afghanistan for the very purpose of curbing the Islamist influence that opposed the switch. Many Pakistani modernists have been looking for ways to reverse the creeping "Talibanization" of their country that the dictator Mohammed Zia ul-Haq initiated two decades ago. But nearly all Pakistanis believe that Kashmir belongs in Pakistan, and that Kashmiri insurgency is genuine and justified.

NEW DELHI, India --Thirty-five Hindus were killed in recent days in two incidents in the Indian-administered portion of the disputed Kashmir province, police said yesterday. The killings were believed to be the work of Islamist militants, days before a meeting of the Indian prime minister with Kashmiri separatists. In one incident, gunmen stormed a village in a district called Doda, dragged Hindu villagers from their homes and shot 22 to death. In another, in neighboring Udhampur district, suspected militants kidnapped 13 villagers from a remote mountainous spot; four of their bodies were found lying in the woods late Sunday and the rest were discovered yesterday, according to police.