Author: Rohit Bansal
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: January 15, 2013
URL: http://dailypioneer.com/business/122266-biz-with-pak-.html

Bravo Arnab Goswami! The Prime Minister has registered your last 6-7 “Addresses to the Nation” and discovered the spine to mumble something on the mutilation of our jawans.

Yes,”it can’t be business as usual with Pakistan!”

Now, that’s well short of the n-threat that “News Hour” has been leading to, but it is certainly heroic by Manmohan Singh’s own standards.

So, here are a few specific ideas that transcend sheer tokenism of sending nine hockey players back but fall well short of outright military conflict that Goswami is being allowed to inflict, night after night.

Now that he’s been pushed by his leader to demonstrate some self respect, Singh can consider hard action on the economic front, an area he’s more familiar than most.

First, he can withdraw “most favoured nation (MFN) status” to Pakistan. This unilateral gesture of ours has gone unreciprocated since 1996. All that successive Governments in Islamabad have done is to tease us with a carrot. When last heard, Pak Commerce Minister Makhdoom Amin Fahim and Secretary Munir Qureshi are coming for the three-day Annual Partnership Summit in Agra. One more “Agra!” One more time, the announcement of MFN to India is on the menu. We don’t even know even if the Pak Government will last. Be that as it may, Fahim and Qureshi can be told right away that they are welcome, but only as tourists. Keep your MFN to yourself! Even as the US on the 14th of last month enacted the Jackson-Vanik Repeal and Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012, which authorizes the President to extend “Permanent Normal Trade Relations” to Russia, but Obama retained the power “to sanction persons who are responsible for gross violations of human rights in Russia.”

A brake in trade ties won’t go unnoticed. International think tanks have told Islamabad that by the next couple of decades, we will become a net importer of agricultural food products, presenting them a golden opportunity, they being our cheapest import market. Pakistan’s cement and textiles barons would feel this pain too.

The shoe must also bite Pak’s leather industry. The chemicals used for the processing of hides are currently being imported from Germany, since they are not on the list of goods allowed to be imported from India. If hocus pocus of “trade as usual” shuts down, the leather sector of Pakistan will continue to live with their cost disadvantage.

Next, on PM’s hit list could be the special visa regime for Pakistan’s businessmen. Sorry Salman Khurshid, who wants visas to be further liberalized. If Pak businessmen wish to do business with us, they should go back to the single-entry regime. Ditto, the bus loads who want “aman” without a modicum of control over Rawalpindi.We’ll try and live without your business, all of 1 per cent of our total exports! (Not that Pakistan will be hurt all that much: we account for 1.7 per cent of their total; but let the message go right down to the smallest trader).

Here, the PM won’t just have to bid farewell to the Nobel Peace Prize he covets. He will have to ignore the doves who argue that the thriving channel of smuggling via Dubai, for instance, will get a fillip if “business as usual” is curtailed. Let some of Pakistan’s war lords be the gainers, but that’s collateral damage.

A typical loser would be, say, Sabih-ur-Rehman, a former major who helps run a brewery and dreams of his Murree beer getting a toe hold in India. We sympathize that Murree, and a thousand such businesses, doddering under fundamentalism, would lose our massive market.

These moves will end Singh’s Nobel dream. They will also disappoint Washington. But if the honour of our slain soldiers has a place on our PM’s radar, “business as usual,” must end.

- (The columnist is CEO & Co-Founder, India Strategy Group, Hammurabi & Solomon Consulting. Tweets @therohitbansal.)