11 April 2004	Sunday	20 Safar 1425

NEW DELHI, April 10: Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee is expected to visit Srinagar on Sunday, but he may face protests from the ruling establishment.

The Indian Express said New Delhi had asked for a postponement of the bus service talks scheduled in Islamabad on April 8-9. It also hinted that the probable cause for the move lay in the complicated negotiations about the kind of the travel documents the two sides would insist on.

What has made it troublesome for a seemingly normal bureaucratic method to postpone a difficult issue to a more opportune moment is that 11 people were killed in Uri and two senior ministers of the Jammu and Kashmir government injured when their meeting to celebrate the road talks was attacked with hand-grenades on Thursday.

Senior officials of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference told Dawn that it was anybody's guess as to who had launched the attack in Uri. They stressed that several official agencies and a few militant groups were opposed to the ruling Peoples Democratic Party making political capital from the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad road talks.

"India's request to postpone the discussions came as a relief to the Pakistani side, which has for some time now evaded the issue of what documentation passengers would carry," the Express said.