INDIA/PAKISTAN: India has given Pakistan 72 hours to make good its promise of reducing cross-border terrorism in Kashmir. If Pakistan acts, India says it will respond "positively" with diplomatic and political steps, to reduce heightened military tension.
Officials said yesterday that India was considering sending back some diplomatic staff to its high commission in Islamabad. They were withdrawn after last December's suicide attack by five gunmen on Delhi's parliament, an attack which was blamed on Pakistan.
India was also likely to restore rail, road and air links with Islamabad "soon". These links had been severed, after which there was a massive military build-up along the 2000-mile long Pakistani frontier.
India's Foreign Minister, Mr Jaswant Singh, told US Secretary of State Mr Colin Powell at the weekend that the Pakistani president's promise to permanently end cross-border terrorism was a "step forward and in the right direction", and after "careful assessment" Delhi would respond "appropriately and positively".
US Deputy Secretary of State Mr Richard Armitage, who visited Islamabad and Delhi last week, said India-Pakistan tensions were down "measurably" and that Washington expected Delhi to take further steps to ease the conflict before US Defence Secretary Mr Donald Rumsfeld began his trip to the region on Wednesday.
But Mr Armitage added: "When you have close to a million men glaring, shouting and occasionally shooting across a territory that is a matter of some dispute, then I think you couldn't say the crisis is over.
"It is quite clear that there will be some actions on the part of India responding to the messages I brought from Islamabad," Mr Armitage said, adding that Delhi was considering the return of its diplomats to Islamabad. India also planned on making "some military gestures as well" before Mr Rumsfeld's arrival in Delhi, Mr Armitage said, but he did not elaborate. India, however, has said it will not pull back its troops from the border until later this year.
Mr Rumsfeld, who begins his trip in Delhi before going to Islamabad on Thursday, is expected to urge the neighbours to ease, through dialogue, the heightened tensions. Fearing the imminent outbreak of war, dozens of countries have evacuated their citizens from Delhi and Islamabad.
Police, meanwhile, arrested Syed Ali Geelani, a hardline separatist leader in Kashmir's summer capital Srinagar, for allegedly receiving money from Pakistan and distributing it to insurgent groups fighting the 13-year-old civil war.
Three Indian soldiers were among 13 people killed at the weekend in a clash with militants and in heavy shelling from either side of the India-Pakistan border, officials said.
This coincided with Pakistan shooting down an unmanned Indian spy plane late Friday evening near the border city of Lahore.
India said one of its Israeli-made spy planes had gone missing after a routine flight near the border, but declined to elaborate.
