Focus on possible dividends from Pakistan-India talks

A ground-breaking agreement reached between Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf and Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee could have positive developmental dividends for both countries, analysts told IRIN on Monday. "This is a welcome sign for the entire region," Dr Rasul Baksh Rais, a professor of political science at the elite Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), told IRIN from Lahore. "Both Pakistan and India have faced development crises for well over half a century," he added. The accord was reached in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad - ending a two and a half year old deadlock between the two nuclear rivals and marked the way to talks aimed at settling outstanding disputes. According to the noted academic, one reason why both countries had not been able to overcome poverty and under-development in their respective countries was the continuation of tensions, military build-ups, arms spending and the defence burdens they resultantly had to carry. "Better relations between India and Pakistan are going to have multiple positive effects on markets in both countries, he said. "They would provide greater certainty to foreign investors, the investment climate would improve and employment generation is going to see a massive effect because both countries have greater potential in investment areas than has been realised," Rais added. Vanita Sharma, a British academic of Indian origin, currently in Pakistan as a visiting faculty member at LUMS, agreed, saying she hoped that the thaw in relations would allow both countries to focus on more pressing social concerns. "I hope that this is going to allow both India and Pakistan to now concentrate on more important issues like education, for instance," said Sharma, who was born and raised in England and is studying for a PhD in history at Oxford University, told IRIN from Lahore. "It should help improve trade between the two countries and improve the economic situation of the people, try and tackle issues like poverty, for example," she added. JOINT STATEMENT Their comments follow a meeting between Musharraf and Vajpayee in the Pakistani capital one week earlier. The two leaders met for just over an hour, before foreign secretaries from both countries held separate, but back-to-back press conferences a day later to announce a joint statement resulting from the talks. Vajpayee was in Pakistan to attend the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit and initially said he would not meet Musharraf before announcing that he would pay him a "courtesy call". Musharraf also held a press conference to proclaim the significance of the meeting soon after the joint statement, which details the resumption this February of a "composite dialogue," had been released. Referring to a previous peace bid between the two leaders in the idyllic Indian town of Agra in July 2001 that stalled when the two sides could not agree on certain points, Musharraf added: "After Agra, I was a disappointed man. Today, I am a happy man." The carefully-whetted six-paragraph said: "In order to carry the process of normalisation forward, the President of Pakistan and the Prime Minister of India agreed to commence the process of the composite dialogue in February 2004." "The two leaders are confident that the resumption of the composite dialogue will lead to peaceful settlement of all bilateral issues, including Jammu and Kashmir, to the satisfaction of both sides," it added. Nuclear-armed Pakistan and India have already fought three wars since gaining their independence in 1947, two of them over the disputed valley of Kashmir, and almost came to a fourth two years ago after a daring attack on the Indian parliament in December, 2001. India blamed the attack on Pakistani-trained insurgents. Pakistan denied the charge but relations ebbed thereafter and close to a million troops stood eyeball-to-eyeball along what is known as the Line of Control (LoC) in a dangerous face-off, likened to the standoff between US and Soviet forces over the Bay of Pigs incident in 1962. DELINKING KASHMIR FROM THE NUCLEAR ISSUE Lt Gen (retd) Naseer Akhtar said he thought the nuclear issue could be de-linked from Kashmir but only according to the manner in which the dialogue moved ahead. "The Kashmir issue is a difficult one because the nation has been talking about it for the last 56 years. India has been talking about it, also. Would the two countries like to resolve it immediately? Would they like to put it on the back-burner for some time?" he asked. "This is where their skill of statesmanship, their diplomacy, will come in and that is the skill where they'll have to prepare their nations," he stressed. But that could prove a challenge. In order for that to happen, Akhtar said, Pakistan first had to prepare its people to accept the verdict of the dialogue. "For that, what they must do is build up a favourable atmosphere in the country. There should be national reconciliation. All parties: the government, the opposition, must put their heads together and support the process of the dialogue towards peace," he maintained. Once peace returned to the sub-continent, the security environment would also change, Akhtar said. "It'll be much easier for us to overcome our problems on the nuclear front, on forces reduction on the borders and then, we'll move towards development," he said. Meanwhile, another retired general said, however, that he felt the recent peace overtures were the result of pressure from Washington. "This is under pressure from the new world order which has been carved out by the United States," Lt. Gen. (Retd) Hamid Gul, a former director-general of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), told IRIN from Rawalpindi, which nestles alongside Islamabad. On the other hand, India also had a need to reach out to Central Asia for economic reasons because at this stage of their economic development, they were importing about 70 per cent of their energy requirements, Gul said. "The way their economy is progressing, if, for another five years or so, they do not have an overland route for gas or oil pipelines to Central Asia, then they will lose out," he emphasised. Akhtar agreed, saying that if India were to progress industrially, it needed to have more energy than it had at present. "That they can only get through Pakistan: from Iran, through a pipeline, it could flow from the Central Asian Republics also," he explained, adding that Pakistan would then benefit from a market of about 1.1 billion people. "Our business, our trade, our economy will also gear up and this region would progress," he said. STRAIT-JACKETED INTO RECONCILIATION But Pakistan had been slowly squeezed into accepting a reconciliation, Gul said. "Pakistan has been strait-jacketed, both by America and India, to accept a reconciliation. So, therefore, Pakistan clearly had no choice," he said. This made for a situation where both opportunities and dangers beckoned the two states into the future, Gul maintained. "The danger for Pakistan is that if Kashmir is not settled, we might see the fight going on there transferred into Pakistan, that the battle might be fought on Pakistani soil, rather than in Kashmir," he stressed. FAST TRACK Akhtar sounded a more optimistic note, though, arguing that the question of Kashmir was one that needed to be answered by Kashmiris from both sides of the Line of Control, and that the process of getting the imbroglio sorted out had started at an impressive pace. "The dialogue is going to be started next month and that is a fast process. They've moved on a very fast track," he said. "And it is not just the US that's interested in this area attaining peace. Russia is also in it and the Chinese have been telling both the countries for a long time that you better start a dialogue and patch up your problems and start economic activity," Akhtar explained. "The United States is interested, because of peace; because they do not want to see Pakistan destabilised and Pakistan taken over by the extremists and towards that end, they would ensure that there is peace, tranquillity and there is a country of economic activity and that Pakistan stands on its own feet and there is a proper democratic process," he added. Similarly, there was plenty of poverty in India and it needed to grow economically so that it became a stable country too, Akhtar said. "Likewise, poverty needs to be alleviated in Pakistan and we need to focus our resources for economic development and reduce defence spending, as, indeed, would India," he said. Sharma agreed, saying that there was plenty of potential for both countries to benefit from improved trade. "I think there would be great potential for India to enter into trading with Pakistan," she said. "But greater people-to-people contact is probably going to be one of the more dramatic changes," she stressed. Her own experience as an "Indian" in Pakistan had been "most wonderful," Sharma said. "And even when I visited India last summer, if I told people I was on my way to Pakistan, they would tell me how lucky I was and that they would also love to come here," she explained.