As for Pakistan, its quick embrace of the United States would have put in abeyance any meaningful Soviet gestures.
NEW DELHI: This is with reference to Tariq Fatemi’s article “Echoes of the past” (October 4). The writer talks about the initial period of Pakistan-Soviet Union relations and how they panned out. He is speaking about a period when Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union. He was deeply suspicious of ‘weak, bourgeois states’ that were still tied in some way or the other to their erstwhile colonial masters. He did not meet India’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, Mrs Vijayalakshmi Pandit, for example, during her tenure in Moscow, even though she was the sister of India’s prime minister. The perspective on India changed only after the Soviet Union saw the role India played in the Korean war.
As for Pakistan, its quick embrace of the United States would have put in abeyance any meaningful Soviet gestures.
David Smith
Published in The Express Tribune, October 5th, 2012.
