PM’s India policy

At the Kartarpur corridor’s groundbreaking ceremony, Prime Minister Imran Khan made a number of groundbreaking statements about how he would like to conduct and shape his government’s India policy.

Currently anti-Pakistan jingoism is at its peak in India which makes one read his statements with a lot of positive curiosity.

The Pakistani PM said the two countries could not move forward without breaking the chains of the past. Citing the example of France and Germany which fought many wars, he asked if these two could move forward why India and Pakistan could not.

He said all the political parties, the government and the Army in Pakistan were on the same page (presumably with regard to his in-the-offing India policy). He said the two neighbours needed will to resolve the Kashmir dispute. And finally he asked what other options the two countries had other than friendship

Imran invited the people of the two countries to think about the immense potential Pakistan and India have — which in case of the bilateral trade is $37 billion, according to a latest World Bank report.

Talking to a group of journalists on key points of the WB report the other day, the author of the document, Sanjay Kathuria, said it was his belief that trust promotes trade, and trade fosters trust, interdependency and constituencies for peace.

This is what PM Imran is perhaps trying to convey to the people of the subcontinent. However, he alone is not likely to make any dent in the current state of mutual mistrust. Without a reciprocal response from the Indian side, no headway is likely to be made in this regard.

The message which one believes Imran is trying to send to the Indian leadership is: Let us try to resolve our disputes, even perhaps Kashmir, using geo-economics rather than geopolitics.

Indeed, it was geo-economics that had made the warring European countries put their petty geopolitical conflicts on the back burner and join hands for mutual economic prosperity. Resultantly, within a decade and half, the economic vested interests of these countries in each other’s wellbeing had deepened and widened so much so that all past conflicts were buried deep under the mounting mutual affluence.

That is the kind of a route Imran seems to have decided to take in order to shape a mutually-profitable economic relationship with India.

But how does he go about achieving this goal with the Kashmir dispute continuing to stick out like a sore thumb? The will that Imran says we need to resolve this dispute with has been missing since the very emergence of the two states.

Because of the lack of the required will, Kashmir dispute has remained a bone of bitterest contention between the two countries leading them all these 71 years nowhere, while frequently punctuating this journey into the unknown with phases of extreme mutual hostility at times breaking into wars to be followed by extended periods of high tension.

History teaches us that lasting and permanent solutions are not reached if one of the two parties to a bilateral dispute concedes everything or wins the entire hand at the negotiating table.

What if the two agree to decide to discuss a mutually-acceptable solution to the dispute on a give-and-take basis while at the same time baby steps are taken to probe the possibilities of setting up mutually-beneficial trade and economic links?

Since Imran is seemingly trying to use geo-economics rather than geopolitics to dictate his India policy, one would not perhaps like to rule out the possibility that one day soon he would offer India, as an initial CBM, land route via Pakistan to trade with Afghanistan and beyond in return for India joining meaningful negotiations to achieve a peaceful and permanent settlement of the Kashmir dispute.

True enough, if there is to be even incremental progress between India and Pakistan, Burkha Dutt, one of India’s veteran journalists tells the Indian leadership “Khan is presently India’s best bet” in her Washington Post (Dec 3) article.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 8^th, 2018.

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