Agence France Presse

New Delhi, May 7:

India will not be deterred by US opposition to a multi-billion dollar gas pipeline from Iran through Pakistan as it is imperative to meet the country’s energy growing needs, India’s foreign minister Natwar Singh said in an interview carried by The Hindu today.

Negotiations to build the $4.5 billion gas pipeline from Iran to India via Pakistan began in 1994 but little headway was made because of tensions between Pakistan and India, which have fought three wars since gaining independence in 1947 from Britain.

But against a backdrop of easing tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbours, Indian Oil Minister Mani Shankar Aiyer said in February he had won cabinet approval for resuming talks on the 2,600-km overland pipeline.

Aiyer also said he would visit Islamabad this month to discuss the logistics of the pipeline linking Iran’s South Pars gas field to India via southwest Pakistan. “Our petroleum minister is going to Pakistan very soon. The earlier impression was that India was the stumbling block. We are not,” Singh said. The minister said New Delhi would proceed with the project despite Washington’s reservations made known by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a visit here in March. Rice offered talks on energy cooperation with India, which a state department official later said would encompass civilian nuclear power as well.

In the interview with The Hindu, the Indian foreign minister also said a peace dialogue with Pakistan on their long-running dispute over the Himalayan region of Kashmir was showing progress. “The composite dialogue is going extremely well,” he said, referring to official talks that resumed early last year.

“There is some terrorist activity going on,” Singh said referring to an Islamic insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir that New Delhi says is actively encouraged by Islamabad, a charge Pakistan denies.

Singh also praised Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, saying that without his “personal involvement,” many confidence-building measures, including the resumption of a bus link between the two zones of Kashmir.