NEW DELHI — Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has welcomed recent peace proposals from Pakistan, the latest sign the rivals may be ready to start hashing out a deal over divided Kashmir, the Himalayan region at the heart of their decades-long dispute.How to solve the Kashmir, divided between India and Pakistan and claimed by both, was the subject of the recent Pakistani proposals. While Singh made no direct mention of the region yesterday, his comments were seen as an indication India could be ready to talk about its fate.

“I had read about some new ideas and thoughts expressed from Pakistan,” Singh said during a speech in the northern Indian city of Amristar.

“We welcome all ideas as they contribute to the ongoing thought process,” he said in Punjabi, according to the official English text of the speech. “The destinies of our two nations are interlinked. We need to put the past behind us.”

The spokeswoman for Pakistan’s foreign ministry, Tasnim Aslam, called Singh’s comments “positive.”

Kashmir, an overwhelmingly Muslim region, has been the focus of two of the three wars predominantly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan have fought since independence from Britain in 1947 during the bloody partition of the subcontinent.

A fitful peace process begun in 2004 has seen tensions ease considerably between the longtime rivals, both nuclear-armed, but there has been little public progress on Kashmir.

Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf earlier this month said Islamabad was willing to give up its claim to all of region if India reciprocated and agreed to jointly administer Kashmir, which would be granted a wide degree of autonomy.

The comments, made in an interview with India’s NDTV station, came less than a month after India and Pakistan renewed the peace process, temporarily suspended by New Delhi following the July 11 Mumbai train bombings, which killed more than 200 people. India says Pakistan’s intelligence agency played a role in the attack, a charge Islamabad denies.

While Musharraf has made similar proposals before, Indian officials have often been irked by him doing so through the media and have rarely responded.

“This time around, they are saying ‘come, show us the proposal, let’s talk,”’ said Samina Ahmed, the South Asia project director for the International Crisis Group.