New tone in India-Pakistan ties

In the meantime, India has proposed seven "confidence-building measures," including additional bus routes between Indian and Pakistani Kashmir, increased cross-border trade, joint promotion of tourism, and cooperation on environmental issues such as forest management. Sunday the two sides agreed to increase transport links, boost business ties, and explore ways to reduce the military presence in Kashmir.

Indian security analysts say that the Indian government should proceed cautiously with Musharraf, who, after all, was the architect of the Kargil war - a conflagration that followed six months of seemingly successful peace talks in Lahore between Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

"Musharraf has to come to the realization that no Indian government is going to make concessions on the border," says Sumit Ganguly, director of the India Studies program at Indiana University in Bloomington. "India simply cannot afford to make any territorial compromises. With China cozying up with India, and with Pakistan seeing the US getting close as well, these could potentially have an effect of making Musharraf more reasonable" at the negotiating table.

Kashmiri separatist leaders welcome any move that makes life easier for the Kashmiri people. But, they add, bus services do not solve the problem.

"India and Pakistan alone cannot decide the fate of the Kashmiri people," says Yasin Malik, chairman of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, a separatist party. "The bus service between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad is a creative CBM [confidence-building measure]. But it is unfortunate. Both India and Pakistan did not bother to take people of Kashmir into consultation in the process."

"If they had been part of the consultation process, this bus process, they would have celebrated," Mr. Malik adds. "It would have been the biggest celebration in Kashmir. Instead, they feel humiliated. If the Kashmiri people will not be a part of the process, then you are pushing Kashmiri youth toward the militants."

Syed Ali Shah Gillani, a hard-line separatist leader and former head of the Indian branch of Jamaat Islami, a separatist party, agreed that bus routes and trade links won't solve the problem.

"As far as the bus is concerned, people are very happy," says Mr. Gillani. He cites common complaints of Kashmiris of living under Indian occupation, with some 350,000 Indian troops and paramilitary forces in Indian Kashmir. "But until their miseries are stopped, until the Indian Army is withdrawn from Kashmir, until Draconian laws are withdrawn, the freedom struggle will continue," he says.

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