India stands firm in its refusal to talk to Pakistan

As departing United Nations staff, foreign diplomats and Western holidaymakers clogged Delhi's airport yesterday, India continued to fend off demands to begin talks with Pakistan.

Even though India's Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and Pakistan's President, General Pervez Musharraf, are at a regional security summit in Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan, the Indian leader refused to meet his counterpart.

Omar Abdullah, a junior minister at India's Foreign Ministry, said in Almaty: "No matter what other countries' opinions are, we are not meeting [Musharraf] here. If we had to meet him we need not have come all the way to Almaty ... The fact of the matter is that the circumstances for the meeting are not right."

General Musharraf has repeatedly called for talks with the Indian leader, and said yesterday that a meeting should be held "without conditions".

But India has demanded an end to what it calls "cross-border terrorism", the infiltration of Islamic radicals into Indian-controlled Kashmir, before it will agree.

Amid fears of a third Kashmir war, the dangerous stand-off between the two-nuclear armed neighbours has prompted Western governments to advise their nationals to leave the two countries.

Yesterday India said communications had been intercepted indicating that orders had gone out to militant groups fighting in Kashmir to stop infiltration but it was too early to know whether the orders were being acted on.

The Almaty conference brings the Indian and Pakistani leaders closer than they have been for several months. Today they will be in the same room, and one Russian official said there was still a slim chance of a three-way meeting mediated by President Vladimir Putin.Russia is India's oldest ally, and has been instrumental in the past in brokering peace between the feuding neighbours.

It was certainly clear that Mr Vajpayee was among friends in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, the vast, largely empty state where the Soviets tested their nuclear weapons. The Russian Defence Minister, Sergei Ivanov, gave the Indian line plain and unvarnished in comments to reporters.

"Armed terrorists and extremists from Pakistan keep infiltrating Indian territory," he said. "This is a fact you can't turn a blind eye to. Moreover, terrorists who are entering India have previously been ousted from Afghanistan."

Mr Ivanov also attacked the nuclear-capable missile tests carried out by Pakistan last week, saying they were "a provocative gesture" when taken against the background of the conflict. "Any nuclear weapons tests carried out in an atmosphere of extreme tension ... are wrong," he said.

Since the weekend, both sides – stung, it appears, by the decision of many Western countries to shun both India and Pakistan until peace returns – strove to downplay fears of war.

India's Defence Minister, George Fernandes, said: "If the Western powers and China know how to keep their nuclear capabilities under control, the same holds good for India and Pakistan."

But his bald assertion ignores the fact that India and Pakistan have yet to adopt the sort of command and control systems developed to safeguard nuclear weapons in the West. It is the lack of such systems that makes the prospect of a south Asian nuclear conflict as plausible as it is terrifying.