The 54-year impasse over northern India's disputed Kashmir state will dominate peace talks between rival claimants India and Pakistan at their three-day peace summit beginning this weekend.
Official sources indicated that the United States was playing a "facilitator's" role that would ensure some modicum of success with India and Pakistan agreeing to various confidence building measures or CBMs.
But definitive and uncompromising statements in recent weeks by the nuclear rivals on Kashmir, over which they have fought two of their three wars since independence in 1947, bodes ill for moves towards resolving this contentious and complex issue at the summit at Agra, the city of the Taj Mahal, 120 miles east of the Indian capital New Delhi.
The Indian Prime Minister, Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee, anxious to "walk the high road to peace" with Pakistan, has categorically declared that Kashmir, the country's only Muslim-majority state, remains an "integral part of India" whose status is not negotiable. His foreign and defence minister, Mr Jaswant Singh, reiterated Delhi's stand that Pakistan-administered Kashmir, which was forcibly occupied after independence, also belonged to India.
Pakistan's new President, Gen Pervez Musharraf, on the other hand, "anxious to change history", has said Kashmir remained the "core issue" and its settlement was predicated to all other outstanding bilateral issues. He stated that the summit would mark a new beginning, provided India displayed the "same open-mindedness" on resolving the quarrel over the mountain state.
And, unlike Delhi that remains defensive on Kashmir and occupies itself with the finer details of hospitality towards the visiting President, Gen Musharraf lost no opportunity, in the run-up to the summit to link diplomatic progress with India's willingness to accommodate him on the "core dispute".
"The US has used its influence with Vajpayee and Gen Musharraf to meet for talks in a region that has become a nuclear flashpoint," a senior diplomat said. The US, he added, is also interested in expanding its interest in the region as it was looking upon India, which had a modern military and a blue water navy with extended reach, as a countervailing force against China.
The US-led CBMs are expected to raise the level of dialogue on Kashmir to a ministerial level with a loose time-frame for settling the dispute, ending the daily artillery duels across the line of control that divides Kashmir and a phased withdrawal of troops from the 21,000-foot Siachen glacier, the world's highest battlefield. Hundreds of soldiers have died in cross-border firing and from exposure to temperatures that average 30 degrees below freezing in Siachen since the mid-1980s.
The confrontation over Siachen is also a financial burden for both sides totalling around $2 m per day. India's outlay in maintaining troop supply lines at higher altitudes is higher as everything is flown in by helicopter. Other CBMs are likely to include the appointment of task forces on lesser crucial outstanding territorial and maritime disputes, enhanced trade and the easing of visa restrictions.
Both sides have used the run-up to the talks by testing the waters and upping the ante by pitching their expectations at one another via the media. "Bargaining is a part of diplomatic and political dialogue," a senior Indian diplomat said. The two countries, he stated, are now making impossible demands and after a show of give and take will, hopefully, under US guidance, reduce the stakes to realistic and workable levels.
The summit will be the first between the neighbours after the 11-week border clash in Kashmir's mountainous Kargil region two years ago in which 1,200 combatants, including 519 Indian soldiers, died. India blamed Gen Musharraf, then Pakistan's army chief, for planning the infiltration by Pakistani soldiers and Islamic mercenaries into its territory and refused to talk with his military administration until it stopped "sponsoring" the 12year-old Islamic insurgency in Kashmir in which over 30,000 people have died.
The last meeting between leaders of the two countries was between Mr Vajpayee and Mr Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan's deposed prime minister, in 1999, nine months after both countries conducted nuclear tests.
Reuters adds: India and Pakistan hardened their positions on Kashmir yesterday ahead of this weekend's summit while five Indian soldiers and seven separatist rebels were killed in skirmishes in the region.
Mr Musharraf insisted he could not remain leader of his country if he accepted India's continued control of the Himalayan territory. "Who in Pakistan could ever accept this?" he asked in an interview with the Dubai-based Gulf News.
Meanwhile, Mr Vajpayee told a local news agency that Kashmir would always remain "the core" of nationhood and he rejected any suggestion of third-party mediation. Pakistan insists that Jammu and Kashmir is disputed territory to be resolved in accordance with UN resolutions.