Rahul Bedi,
in New Delhi
The five-month-old peace process between nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, who came close to war last year, has hit a dead end.
Spiralling insurgent violence in disputed Kashmir state, which is divided between the two but claimed by both, and the exchange of insults and accusations at the recently concluded United Nations General Assembly session in New York, have derailed the fledgling peace process between the neighbours.
Two of the three India-Pakistan wars since independence 56 years ago, and the 11-week long border conflict in 1999 in which 1,200 soldiers died, have been over Kashmir.
Nearly 1,300 people had died in terrorist-related incidents in Kashmir in April after India's prime minister Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee extended a "hand of friendship" to Pakistan and offered dialogue with Kashmiri Muslim separatists.
India accuses Pakistan of fuelling Kashmir's civil war that has claimed over 36,000 lives, a claim that Islamabad, under US pressure, tacitly admitted last year, but has denied ever since. It, however, admits to providing "moral, political and diplomatic" support to the Kashmiri separatist struggle.
The exponential rise in Kashmir's killings, nearly 300 people were killed in September alone, found voice at the UN, where India called Islamabad the "epicentre of terrorism". Pakistani officials responded by accusing Delhi of being the "mother of terrorism" for the human-rights violations its military had unleashed in the war-torn region.
Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf declared Kashmir to be the "most dangerous dispute in the world", a veiled reference to the atomic weapons both sides possess and have frequently threatened to use as tensions between them have frequently escalated after their 1998 nuclear tests.
Mr Vajpayee responded by withdrawing his offer of dialogue until Islamabad ceased sponsoring "cross-border" terrorism in Kashmir and elsewhere in India.
But the search for peace has not been without some dividends.
It led to the resumption in July of the bus service between Delhi and the Pakistani city of Lahore, 18 months after it was discontinued following the December 2001 attack on India's parliament by what Delhi says were Pakistan-backed Kashmiri gunmen.
The respective high commissioners who were withdrawn after the attack on parliament, which almost led to war, have returned to take up their posts. Although bilateral air and rail links still remain suspended, the repatriation of scores of Indian and Pakistani nationals, such as fishermen who had strayed inadvertently across the border and who were languishing in jail for years, has started.
Pakistan, however, is alarmed by India's negotiation of a complex web of treaties, defence alliances and covert agreements with neighbouring Afghanistan, Iran and central Asian republics such as Tajikistan to strategically "encircle" Islamabad.
Islamabad also suspects India's involvement in fomenting unrest in its Northern Territories, which border China and are part of Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
The restive population in these territories remain hostile to Islamabad.