NEW DELHI, Jan 31: India and Pakistan will get another opportunity to meet and shake hands or mount verbal attacks on each other over Kashmir during the 13th summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) to be held in Kuala Lumpur from Feb 20-25.

The Non-Aligned Movement was formed as an alternative to the western and communist blocs during the Cold War and is seen as increasingly irrelevant since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but representatives from 114 member-states will still head to the Malaysian capital.

While India and Pakistan have not announced their delegations, high-level sources here said Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee will attend the meet.

They said they believed President Gen Pervez Musharraf may skip the meet and send Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali or Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri.

It will be the fourth time the top Indian and Pakistani leadership will share a dais since a bloody militant attack on the Indian parliament on Dec 13, 2001, that brought the South Asian nuclear rivals dangerously close to war.

India blamed the attack on Pakistan-based extremists, which Islamabad denied and condemned. The two sides then deployed a million troops to their shared borders, who began to be withdrawn only in October 2002.

The Kuala Lumpur summit, according to Malaysian Foreign Minister Syed Hamid, is likely to focus on “terrorism”.

“Terrorism will still be at centre stage because many countries in NAM are those that have been targeted,” Syed Hamid said on Dec 2.

He said the spotlight would focus on how the developing countries could cooperate to combat terror.

The last NAM summit was held in Durban, South Africa, in 1998. It was attended by Mr Vajpayee and Pakistan’s then foreign minister Sartaj Aziz and also became a battleground over Kashmir, with the two sides restating their stands.

The 12th summit’s “final document” talked of the need to combat “terrorism”, but also called for a resolution to the half-century Kashmir dispute.—AFP