India welcomes Pakistan's surprise Kashmir offer

India welcomed yesterday Pakistan's surprise offer to set aside its decades-old demand for a UN-mandated referendum on the future of the disputed Kashmir region.

Indian Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha, in New Delhi's first reaction to Islamabad's offer, said his government would always be ready to accept any change in the Pakistani position that a plebiscite in Kashmir was the only way out of the thorny dispute that has plagued relations between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

"We have always suggested flexibility," Sinha told reporters yesterday after a cabinet meeting on security.

In an interview with Reuters on Wednesday, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf offered to set aside Islamabad's 50-year-old demand to implement UN resolutions calling for both sides to withdraw troops and for Kashmiris to decide in a vote on whether to be part of India or Pakistan.

Sinha said: "It is Pakistan which has been rigid, it is Pakistan which talks about the centrality of the issue. So if there is any change or modification in the Pakistani position, that's something which India will always be ready to welcome."

On both sides of the divided Himalayan region, the trigger for two of three wars between the rival neighbours, the offer spurred quiet hopes for peace as well as charges of betrayal.

In the heart of Kashmir, in the ancient Indian-controlled city of Srinagar, people had earlier urged India to respond positively to Musharraf's apparent concession.

"India has to reciprocate... only then a solution is possible. Only then our sufferings, miseries and hardships will end," said Mohammad Maqbool, houseboat owner on Srinagar's famous mountain-fringed Dal Lake, yesterday.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed in a 14-year insurgency on the Indian side of Kashmir, its only Muslim-majority state, while tourists have been driven away and the economy devastated.

Dismissing talk of any U-turn in policy, a close aide to Musharraf said in Islamabad the offer was consistent with the president's previous policy statements.

"It is his consistent statement that for resolution of an issue, we have to move away from our stated positions."

The aide explained that moving away from Pakistan's "stated position" clearly meant dropping the demand for a referendum, so Musharraf was merely spelling out an offer he had made before.

Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said Pakistan still supported the idea of a plebiscite but would discuss alternative proposals at any talks with India on Kashmir.