Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in an interview with an Indian television channel spoke about the need to drain the poison that has bedevilled the Indo-Pakistani relationship for the last 50 years. The animosity, hatreds and suspicions, he said, which had held the peoples of the two countries in thrall should be cast aside for a future built on trust and goodwill.
Mr Sharif hoped he would be able to visit India to see an Indo-Pakistan cricket match, just as he wished his Indian counterpart, Inder Kumar Gujral, could do the same by crossing the border from the opposite direction.
These were wise and generous words and they are sure to strike a chord with millions of Indians who, like Mr Sharif, feel that something went badly wrong with the Indo-Pakistan relationship in the past, that old wounds were allowed to fester for far too long and that the time has now come to put things right, step by step.
The fourth of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Freedoms was the freedom from fear. India and Pakistan must shed their fear of the other, for without that the darkness will not be lifted. Given the violence and tragedies that have haunted the lives of millions of Indians and Pakistanis, and the reflexive hostility between the two countries ever since their traumatic birth in mid-August 1947, it will not be easy to change course suddenly.
ADVENTURE OF PEACE
Injuries take time to heal, but the healing process has surely to have a beginning. Why not now? Other nations have sought the adventure of peace whereas before they had craved the excitement of crisis and war. France and Germany buried their age-old conflict and rivalry and decided to become partners in a new Europe. East and West Germany became whole again when the infamous Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989. More triumphantly, the Cold War was concluded without a shot being fired and the erstwhile nuclear adversaries, Russia and America, joined hands in the bid to build a better and braver world.
The Indo-Pakistan relationship requires its own glasnost and perestroika. Part of the process will entail unsparing introspection, mulling over past mistakes and follies. However, good intentions alone will not guarantee a favourable climate. Steps have to be taken on the ground to take the relationship forward.
Let us start with the easing of travel restrictions, the unfettered exchange of newspapers, journals and films, and measures to increase trade and economic co-operation. Working together in these areas will be valuable experience in opening other doors.
Attention all the while can also be focussed on whatever topic either of the parties wishes to discuss, such as Kashmir. But this multitrack approach does not preclude scrutiny of individual or collective concerns.
A Pakistani journalist recently averred that closer economic ties between contiguous Indian and Pakistani territories was a clever Indian ploy to inveigle Islamabad into confederation with New Delhi. It is being mired in just those negative attitudes that has reduced Indo-Pakistan relations to a barren waste.
COMPROMISE
The all or nothing approach promises no rewards. Each side has its compulsions and imperatives; maximalist demands would thus be a futile exercise. Compromise based on reason and common sense is the true way out of the more intractable Indo-Pakistan disputes. At the end of the day, each side must feel it has gained more than it has lost, that no advantage has been gained at the expense of the other, that the victory is one in which each can share.
With this new spirit abroad in New Delhi and Islamabad, the business of conflict resolution can be seriously addressed. Slowly swords can be turned into ploughshares and we can then hear the first strains of an Indo-Pakistan Ode to Joy.
By Premen Addy
