Author: Editorial
Publication: The Free Press Journal
Date: October 31, 2003
Pakistan has been obliged at last
to offer a weak and conditional response to this country's twelve specific
proposals aimed at dissolving some of the tensions that have bedeviled
Indo-Pak relations for quite some time. The publicly made offer of the
Indian Ministry of External Affairs had taken its counterpart in Islamabad
by surprise. In a deft diplomatic move Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha
had sought to resume sporting ties, restore rail, road and air links, offered
to open more visa offices for Pakistani citizens and offered to re-start
the Mumbai-Karachi ferry service besides allowing the people of Jammu and
Kashmir to visit the Pak-Occupied Kashmir by road through designated routes
via the Line of Actual Control. Behind the proposals lay the Indian strategy
to reach out to the people of Pakistan over the heads of the military rulers
in Islamabad and elsewhere in that country.
Pakistan was forced on the back
foot by the Indian initiative. Given that the ruling class in Pakistan
had frustrated all attempts at normalisation of relations between the two
estranged neighbours, it made sense for India to want to reach out to the
people of that country, if for nothing else than to alleviate their sufferings
on account of a near rupture in ties between the two countries. Considering
that there were divided families on both sides of the international border,
the proposal to increase the visa offices and to facilitate cheap travel
via rail or bus would certainly have gone down well in countless families
in Lahore and Karachi and further afield in the Pak countryside.
The Indian proposals marked a PR
coup of sorts. Pakistan could not have rejected them outright without appearing
to be downright cussed and unfriendly towards this country. But even if
it had wanted to reject them out of hand, the demands of international
diplomacy did not allow it that luxury. The US Secretary of State, Colin
Powel, upped the ante for Pakistan when he congratulated Sinha for his
proposals. It is clear that he leaned on Islamabad to respond positively
to India's version of Confidence Building Measures with Pakistan. Expectedly,
Pakistan came up with a half-hearted approach, saying no to a couple of
proposals while accepting some others conditionally.
One proposal it has accepted unconditionally
is the resumption of cricketing and other sporting ties. Admittedly, Pakistan
had all along been pressing for the resumption of cricketing ties in the
mistaken belief that it had a superior side which could get the better
of India easily. Beating India occasionally on the cricket ground seemed
to puff up the collective Pakistani chest as if that alone would justify
its belligerence against this country over Kashmir.
Cricket aside, Pakistan hasn't been
able to get the Kashmir bee out of its bonnet, suggesting on Wednesday
that India allow UN to man checkpoints on the LoC for the proposed road
link between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad in the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
It knows full well that India will not budge from its old and firm position
that Kashmir is a bilateral dispute and in no condition would India agree
to the third party intervention in this dispute. Pakistan's suggestion
for UN observers at the LoC was a crude attempt to revive its ill-motivated
campaign for a third party intervention despite a clear rejection of the
same in the Indira Gandhi Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto Shimla Agreement of 1972.
Indeed, India reacted with some
anger at the Pak suggestion to involve the UN in the proposed plying of
a bus service between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad. That Pakistan felt constrained
to offer a weak and conditional acceptance of India's peace package was
clear from the assertion of its hawkish Foreign Secretary, Riaz Khokhar,
who insisted that real peace would prove elusive unless `the cancerous
and poisonous issue' of Kashmir was settled. Pakistan clearly was consumed
by this cancer of Kashmir and it was showing in the level of its socio-economic
development. Pakistan also sought to delink the resumption of air links
from the resumption of rail links. Even on the resumption of air links
it sought an assurance that these would not be snapped unilaterally, a
demand India was unwilling to concede given the past perfidy of Islamabad.
So what is one to make of the Indian
offer and its conditional acceptance by Pakistan? In one word, nothing.
These are moves made more to appease international opinion, especially
the minders of the world sitting in Washington on whose antenna a nuclear-powered
South Asia has begun to register far more than at anytime in the past.
India, on its part, has nothing to fear from Washington since it does not
covet Pak territory nor does it seek to resolve the pending matter of POK
by exporting terror to that country or by waging a covert or overt war
against it. It is Pakistan which should be chary of the American pressure
since its obsessive Kashmir campaign is based on unreal expectations and
is backed by what are unlawful and unacceptable methods world-wide.
The peace package of India helps
generate hope, albeit bleak, of near normalisation in the Indo-Pak relations
sometime in the distant future even as Paki terrorists continue to kill
and maim innocents in the name of Islamic jihad in Kashmir.
