NEW DELHI, May 19: Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has expressed support for Pakistan to have peaceful borders with all its neighbours and not just with India, sources close to his meeting on Friday with Pakistan’s opposition leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman said.

“India supports a strong, stable and secure Pakistan,” Dr Singh told the leader of the Muttahida Majlis Amal (MMA), according to the sources. “We hope that Pakistan’s western borders would be as safe and peaceful as we earnestly desire its eastern flanks facing us to be.”

Indian peace activist Pandit N.K. Sharma, who accompanied the Maulana at the 90-minute breakfast meeting, said it was attended by Indian National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan, with whom the Pakistani leader had a separate round of talks too. Mr Sharma was a confidante of former prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and had met President Gen Pervez Musharraf in Rawalpindi in October last year.

The MMA leader has scheduled a meeting with Indian opposition leader Lal Kishan Advani on Saturday before setting off for the Deoband Muslim seminary, his hosts for the week-long visit, a two-hour drive from Delhi.

Issues discussed with the Indian prime minister ranged from Kashmir and Afghanistan to democracy in Pakistan. The Maulana, according to Mr Sharma, had condemned the killing of an Indian engineer in the Zabul region of Afghanistan recently, and said it could not be the work of the Taliban as he knew the group.

An Indian news agency report quoted the Maulana as telling the prime minister that he opposed the Taliban’s demand that Indian workers in Afghanistan should go home. Mr Sharma said the fact was that the Maulana had condemned the killing of the Indian engineer as un-Islamic and as the work of some criminal elements.

He urged Dr Singh to use India’s excellent ties with Kabul to allow the Taliban to live as free citizens in their country. He said they had a right to hold their ideological views as anyone else. “Those who are reviled by the international community are not necessarily out to harm their own people,” Maulana Fazl was quoted as saying.

He observed that Afghanistan had lived in peace under the Taliban regime and, moreover, the country during their rule became virtually free of the drug menace. The scourge had come back to haunt the region with vengeance, he said.

The Maulana is accompanied by a five-member delegation of Senators and parliamentarians. They urged Dr Singh to give a required push to the peace process with Pakistan. There was a feeling that relations between the two countries lacked warmth.

Dr Singh said he was keenly looking forward his forthcoming visit to Pakistan.