COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — The leaders of India and Pakistan met Wednesday for the first time since testing atomic weapons and walked away promising to keep working toward easing tensions between their two nations.
Prime Ministers Atal Behari Vajpayee of India and Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan disclosed few details of their private 45-minute meeting but said they had ordered their foreign ministers to plan more talks.
The encounter, however brief and thin on substance, was eagerly awaited in the West and throughout South Asia, where the two nations' rivalry has suddenly raised the specter of nuclear war.
It injected the supple words of diplomacy into a relationship that only weeks ago was marked by bullying and belligerence.
"The inescapable reality that confronts us today is that South Asia is now nuclearized," Sharif told a gathering of leaders from across the region. "It is for us to steer away from the gathering storm."
Held in this heavily guarded tropical capital, where soldiers peer over sandbagged checkpoints on every corner, the Vajpayee-Sharif meeting stole the show from what promised to be a humdrum gathering of the seven nations of South Asia. The talks between the two prime ministers were the first formal discussions between the governments of India and Pakistan since September 1997.
Since May, when India and Pakistan tested atomic devices, the nuclear arms issue has dominated public discourse and plunged the two countries' economies into disarray. Stung by U.S. sanctions, the currencies and stock markets of the two nations have tumbled, and Pakistan is threatening to suspend payments on its foreign debt.
The brief burst of public enthusiasm in Pakistan and India after the tests has given way to widespread alarm and despair.
Yet for all the urgency, there seemed to be little hope Wednesday that Vajpayee and Sharif could resolve the underlying issues that have fueled the enmity between India and Pakistan for the past half a century.
Principal among those is Kashmir, the Himalayan region claimed by Pakistan and India and occupied in part by both. A byproduct of the bloody partition of India and Pakistan, Kashmir is the source of two of the three wars the countries have fought since their independence in 1947. Today, the armies of Pakistan and India regularly shell each other across the border, and Pakistan continues to support an insurgency in Indian-occupied Kashmir that has killed more than 20,000 people since 1989.
