NEW DELHI: Pakistan and India exchanged information about each other’s nuclear facilities on Tuesday, continuing an annual cooperative practice even as both nations have severed transportation links, limited diplomatic contacts and deployed tens of thousands of troops along their shared border.

The exchange of the lists, which include the exact location of their nuclear installations, is the latest sign of an easing of a tense standoff between the two countries, which both tested nuclear weapons in 1998.

They have been trading the lists since 1992 under an agreement that they will refrain from attacking each other’s nuclear facilities in the event of a war. Both have said there is no chance that their current dispute will escalate into nuclear war.

On Monday, in a move that India called “a step forward,” Pakistan announced that it had arrested more than two dozen radical Muslims, including the leader of a group, Lashkar-i-Taiba, that India has blamed for a Dec 13 attack on its parliament building. Last week, Pakistani authorities detained almost 50 fighters, among them the leader of another group, Jaish-i-Mohammad, which allegedly orchestrated the parliament attack.

On Tuesday, there were indications that Pakistan’s crackdown was continuing. A Jaish-e-Mohammad official said that more than a dozen of its activists had been detained in Sindh.

In his New Year address on Monday, India’s prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, said that his country was willing to extend a “hand of alliance” to Pakistan if it continued to rein in fighters who had carried out “terrorist attacks” in India. “Take effective steps to stop cross-border terrorism and you will find India willing to walk more than half the distance to work closely with Pakistan to resolve, through dialogue, any issue,” he said in comments directed at President Pervez Musharraf.

Although Indian officials dismissed the possibility of a face-to-face meeting between Vajpayee and Musharraf at a summit of regional leaders in Nepal later this week, the officials said that no decision had been made about whether the Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers would meet.

Pakistan has urged India to agree to a meeting, but Indian officials had maintained that Pakistan must clamp down on its hardline Muslim groups first for a meeting to be productive. With Pakistan taking steps in that direction, political analysts in New Delhi said that the chances of a meeting among the foreign ministers now appear increasingly likely.

After the attack on the parliament, Indian leaders said they were seriously considering ordering military strikes against Pakistan, which they accuse of arming and training the fighters. India’s decision to dispatch troops and ballistic-missile batteries to its border led to a similar mobilization in Pakistan.

India and Pakistan also have reduced the sizes of their diplomatic missions in each other’s countries, and both have halted cross-border passenger rail, bus and air travel. This has led to anguished farewells, as people were forced to cut short visits with relatives on the other side.

With many people unable to get seats on the packed last trains and aeroplanes out of India on Monday, India on Tuesday said that it would allow two Pakistan International Airlines flights to carry Pakistanis out of this city and Mumbai this week.

Despite that and other the political gestures, Indian and Pakistani troops exchanged heavy gunfire on Tuesday along the Line of Control, officials said. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post