India's new foreign minister, Natwar Singh, said Tuesday India and Pakistan would hold talks this month on nuclear confidence-building measures and ways to push the peace process forward."We've agreed with Pakistan that officials of the two sides will meet in New Delhi on June 19 and 20th for talks relating to nuclear confidence-building measures and on June 27th and June 28th at the foreign secretary level (to discuss the peace process)," Singh told a news conference.
Singh said the peace dialogue with Pakistan would continue and that India had supported Pakistan's recent re-entry into the Commonwealth.
Some analysts had suggested that efforts to end more than half a century of hostility over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir could slow under the new communist-backed Congress-led coalition in New Delhi.
The nuclear-armed neighbours have fought three wars, two of them over Kashmir. They nearly went to war again in 2002 but were reeled back by hectic international diplomacy.
Singh also said media speculation that the new government would change Indian policy towards the United States was unfounded and that bilateral ties would be strengthened.
He said the country wanted a close, acrimony-free and multi-faceted relationship with the United States and that there was a need to further "strengthen, deepen and widen" it.
Singh said there were "differences" with United States but they would not be aired publicly.
Rather they would be "addressed diplomatically and tactfully," he said.
Singh also announced India's National Security Advisor J.N. Dixit, a former senior career diplomat, would be India's representative in talks with China on settling their boundary dispute, over which the two countries fought a brief, bitter war in 1962.
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