The Indian Prime Minister, Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee, yesterday urged Pakistan to sign a no-first-use nuclear weapon pact and a non-aggression accord with India.
Mr Vajpayee, who is due to meet his Pakistani counterpart, Mr Nawaz Sharif, later this month for the first time since the two neighbours staged rival nuclear tests in May, said Islamabad should make concrete moves to ensure peace.
The Hindu nationalist leader told parliament that Islamabad should "change its foreign policy" and stop supporting Muslim insurgency in the divided state of Kashmir - the cause of two wars.
The Prime Minister said a "non-aggression treaty" would figure in his talks with Mr Sharif on the sidelines of a South Asian summit in Colombo. "If Pakistan agrees to this pact, it will be one more step in confidence-building measures between the two countries," he said. , adding: "We hope Pakistan will co-operate and the meeting will be fruitful.
"We don't want war. We want to have good, friendly relations with Pakistan. Pakistan has to change its foreign policy towards India. It should have no objection to a no-first-use pact."
He said Mr Sharif had referred to a pact with India during a speech at the United Nations general assembly in New York "but he has not sent any proposal to us". Mr Vajpayee claimed Pakistan was supporting an anti-Indian rebellion in Kashmir, the Himalayan territory divided between the neighbours since their 1947 independence from British rule.
More than 20,000 people have died in Indian-administered Kashmir since 1989 in violence linked to the Muslim separatist drive.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported that a Pakistani nuclear scientist who recently claimed Pakistan was planning a pre-emptive nuclear strike against India is a fraud.
"He doesn't know the most elementary facts about what a nuclear reactor is. Our guess is he doesn't have more than a high school education," Mr Frank von Hippel, head of the Federation of American Scientists told the daily newspaper.
Mr Iftikhar Chaudhry Khan (29) said through his lawyer last week that he had defected from Pakistan after hearing at a top-secret meeting in April that Pakistan was considering a nuclear strike against India in the light of the militant Hindu party's ascent to power.
Mr Von Hippel and several associates from Princeton University interviewed Mr Khan by telephone for an hour on Monday, inquiring about his alleged graduate education, work for the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and understanding of nuclear physics. "Everything was wrong," Mr von Hippel told the newspaper. An unidentified senior US official who reviewed government agencies reports about Mr Khan's claims told the Post the man was "an absolute fraud". Soon after Mr Khan's claims were first published in USA Today on July 1st, the US State Department said it could not back up his statements. Pakistan denied Mr Khan's allegations and said the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission did not have an officer by Mr Khan's name.