ISLAMABAD, Oct 3: Information Minister Mohammad Ali Durrani here on Tuesday said that forces in India and Pakistan which wanted to keep the ongoing peace process hostage were destined to be defeated.

The leadership of both the countries are well-aware that there could be no peace in the region until Pakistan and India resolved their outstanding issues, including the core issue of Kashmir peacefully. And for this, bilateral talks will have to be resumed, said Mr Durrani while talking to newsmen here on Tuesday.

“Leaderships of Pakistan and India need to take creative initiatives and out-of-the-box solutions need to be considered,” he stressed.

The information minister, however, refused to reply to any questions about President Pervez Musharraf’s book “In the Line of Fire” when he was asked whether Dr A. Q. Khan would be allowed to defend himself against remarks in the book that he was a greedy publicity seeker who was at the centre of a major proliferation ring that supplied nuclear information and material to countries like Iran, Libya and North Korea.

The minister said Pakistan had emerged as a flag-bearer of peace in the South Asian region after the president’s visit to Europe and the US.

He said the visit had highlighted that Pakistan was a nuclear state and that it needed nuclear energy for its burgeoning economy and process of industrialisation. That it should be treated as an equal of India as the US embarked on the process of supplying nuclear energy to India for peaceful purposes.

“This policy is indefensible and giving India priority over Pakistan would lead to discrimination and would adversely affect the peace in the region,” he observed.