LAHORE, May 29: The Kashmir Action Committee, Pakistan, has expressed grave concern at the recent statements of Indian prime minister and foreign minister on Kashmir and urged the Pakistan government to take serious note of them.

In a statement issued here on Saturday, KACP president Dr Muzaffar Shah said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh claimed that India would not accept any settlement, which called for a plebiscite in Kashmir, or any change in borders on religious considerations.

Dr Shah said Jammu and Kashmir was a disputed territory and its people have yet to decide their political future. This was an understanding given by India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, a Congress icon, on several occasions to Kashmiris and the world community.

This was the agreement that India had signed with Pakistan while accepting UN Security Council resolutions of 1948 and 1949. Despite these commitments India chose to hold Kashmir by military occupation, he added.

He said Indian prime minister's statement would smother the nascent peace process, dampen public interest and expectations from composite dialogue and undermine the hopes of reconciliation.

He said Indian foreign minister Natwar Singh has come up with another and disturbing statement about Indo-Pakistan peace talks. In an interview to the Hindustan Times he said the progress in these talks could only be made if the Kashmir issue was kept aside.

He said Natwar Singh should know better than anybody else that there was no other basic issue which he wanted to solve by keeping the Kashmir dispute aside.

He said the analogy of dispute between India and China could not be held good in case of India and Pakistan. The dispute with China was just a border dispute involving control of a few kilometres of territory.

The Kashmir dispute involved the future political destiny of about 120 million people. Natwar Singh with his long and bright diplomatic career must know the difference between the two situations.

He said it could be another gimmick of the new Indian government to wriggle out of the commitment of its predecessor concerning a composite dialogue.