ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan has made a new offer in its bitter dispute with India over Kashmir, saying for the first time that it will not oppose one-on-one talks between Kashmiri separatists and the Indian government.
Pakistan shifted its position over the weekend when it announced a unilateral cease-fire on its border with India in Kashmir, foreign ministry spokesman Mohammed Riaz Khan said Monday.
It was a significant concession from Pakistan, which in the past has said it must be included in any negotiations on Kashmir, a Himalayan region that has been a focus of bitter contention with India for decades.
But militant Pakistan-based separatists have rejected recent efforts to forge peace in Indian-ruled Kashmir and continued their 11-year-old insurgency, claiming responsibility for a deadly explosion Monday.
The blast near a bus station in Baramullah, 30 miles north of Kashmir's summer capital, Srinagar, killed two people — a soldier and a civilian — and wounded 22 people, 18 of them military personnel, an Indian army official said.
The Hezb-ul Mujahedeen group, which leads a council representing 14 guerrilla groups, claimed responsibility for the explosion, which it claimed killed 10 Indian soldiers. The militants have rejected bilateral talks and demanded three-way talks with Pakistan and India. However, leaders of an alliance of Kashmiri separatist political parties were in New Delhi seeking to start a peace process.
"We have to rise above prejudices, bitterness in history as well as hostilities rooted in the past, and find a way out," said Abdul Gani Bhat, chairman of the All Party Hurriyat Conference. He said that "the opportunity has to be seized."
Pakistan would not object to bilateral talks between India and Kashmiri separatists as long they lead to three-way negotiations involving Pakistan, Khan told the Associated Press.
Khan called the statement an "important initiative" and said Pakistan wants three-way talks to start "immediately after Ramadan," the Muslim holy month that began last week.
Since Britain gave the subcontinent independence in 1947, India and Pakistan have both claimed all of Kashmir and have fought two wars over it. A 1972 cease-fire line divided Kashmir between the countries, most of it going to India.
Pakistan-based rebels have been fighting since 1989 to carve out a separate homeland or merge Indian-controlled Kashmir with Islamic Pakistan.