Former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's legacy of fostering India-Pakistan friendship, that earlier appeared threatened by the new government, remains alive.

External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh on Saturday reiterated India's commitment to peace with Pakistan and improved bilateral ties, and assured that his government will look to implementing a less restrictive visa regime for journalists and common people.

Natwar Singh was the chief guest at a South Asian Free Media Association regional conference in New Delhi.

He said his government is committed to allowing journalists from South Asian countries the freedom to move around freely in India and urged the same in other countries.

Currently, journalists are given visas that restrict them to a single city or region.

He also pointed out that his government had, for the first time ever, allowed a delegation of Pakistani journalists to visit Jammu and Kashmir.

He said as India, Pakistan and other South Asian countries sought to move towards cooperation and economic integration, a huge responsibility fell upon the media to portray issues correctly.

 Listing the agenda for the media, he said: "There is a huge deficit in information about each other's countries and also there are negative perceptions and much misinformation about each other," he said.

He called upon the media to play a correcting role in sharing information that went beyond politics to economics, society, culture, lifestyles and urged that all such information be handled sensitively.

The external affairs minister pointed out that the media and means of communication have seen big changes and that in such an environment it is necessary to have an exchange of media personnel at the level of editor and reporters to facilitate better understanding of each other.

Apologising for focusing so much on India and Pakistan to the exclusion of other South Asian nations, he pointed out that given the problems inherent in India-Pakistan relations, this was perhaps inevitable.

The minister said that the last 12 months had seen a sea change in India-Pakistan ties. "Hear Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's speech to the United Nations in September 2003 and hear it again in September 2004. There is a huge difference. Similarly, the speech of our prime ministers in 2003 and 2004 are different," he said.

In 2003, he said, both sides spoke acrimoniously; in 2004, both sides vowed to pursue peace.

The minister praised SAFMA for its endeavours in promoting India-Pakistan peace and the cause of journalists on both sides. It was SAFMA that had first demanded that South Asian journalists be given the freedom to travel in each other's countries.

Delivering the keynote address, Khalid Ahmed, executive editor, The Daily Times and The Friday Times, published in Pakistan, urged journalists to push for the cause of peace. He said politicians cannot imagine far enough, while the bureaucracy is too calcified and fixed to come up with new ideas to break the South Asian stalemate.

He warned that in India and Pakistan, the concept of nuclear deterrence, as it existed in the West, had failed as was proven by the Kargil War, which occurred after both India and Pakistan had tested nuclear weapons.

"Many people say that Pakistan has not done enough for Kashmir. I say that Pakistan has sacrificed everything for Kashmir and failed to wrest it," he stated. "The status quo that exists today has been frozen and current methods will not change it."

He also warned that the coming years would see new battles between South Asian countries over rivers. "Territorial battles are slowly giving way to river and water wars, not just between states but also between provinces," he pointed out.

He urged the journalists present not to look for any specific script or roadmap for peace between India and Pakistan. "It is an evolving process and hence there can no be fixed plan," he said.

He also said that a gas pipeline from Iran to India via Pakistan would be a great boost to normalising ties. "It is not a question of how much Pakistan will earn, but the fact that a pipeline will force Pakistani authorities to impose municipal laws in tribal areas, overruling their tribal laws," he said.

He also urged India, as the largest and core country in South Asia, to be sympathetic to the problems of its neighbours on the periphery. He pointed out that it was in India's interest to have a prosperous South Asia as unstable neighbours would impinge on India's stability.