It’s the economy, stupid

India should stop playing so hard to get. It should accept PM Nawaz Sharif’s unconditional offer of friendship.

Letting foreign policy issues be guided by the street is like riding a tiger. Once the ride begins, you can forget about getting down when you want to because if you do, more likely than not, the tiger would trample you and if you don’t, even then you are likely to meet the same fate because you are certain to be thrown off when the tiger gets tired of carrying your load. For example, take the issue of offering India the Most-Favoured Nation (MFN) status or allowing India transit facility through Pakistan to trade with Afghanistan and onwards.

In the case of MFN, we are not giving any concession to India; we are simply reciprocating a step that New Delhi has already taken by offering Pakistan the MFN status. But every time an official move appears to be in the offing in this respect, Hafiz Saeed, the head of the Jamatud Daawa, brings his hordes on the street protesting the move. What Hafiz Saeed and his sponsors refuse to see in their twisted wisdom is that increased trade with our more developed neighbour would bring down considerably our dependence on foreign dole (which compromises greatly our sovereignty) as our import bill would go down drastically, at least in the case of intermediaries and raw materials, which at present we are importing paying prohibitive freight costs from far off euro, dollar and sterling markets. Even many of the essential but costly finished goods which we are currently importing from overseas, we can fabricate more economically within the country by importing the required components and skilled manpower from India. In return, Pakistan would get a massive Indian market to explore. The huge difference in the exchange rate between the currencies of the two countries would make our goods highly competitive in India.

And the street is also opposed to allowing India transit trade facility as the forces with street power have been given to understand that this would throw our doors wide open for the Indian spy machine to operate freely in our country.

Every country has spies to spy on other countries, especially on neighbours and more especially those neighbours with whom they have gone to war a number of times. India, I am sure, already has a number of its agents in our country as, I assume, we have our own in India. Our job is not to close shop in order to keep these spies from spying on us but to continue on the road to progress and development in spite of these spies; of course, there are a number of measures one can take, if one has the will and the appropriate skills, to neutralise the operations of foreign spies to a great extent. If we assess the issue of allowing transit trade facility to India unemotionally and purely in economic terms, we would not miss the immense benefits that would accrue to Pakistan at a minimum cost that we would be required to pay for keeping a close eye on Indian spies in Pakistan.

Also, let us not make the offer of MFN status to India conditional to the start of a composite dialogue or that of transit trade facility conditional to the resolution of the Kashmir issue because then India would be justified in making composite dialogue conditional to bringing the culprits of the Mumbai massacre to book by Pakistan and to verifiable closure of all jihadi training camps in Pakistan and Azad Kashmir. On its part, India should also stop playing so hard to get. It should accept Prime Minister (PM) Nawaz Sharif’s unconditional offer of friendship. Even the army leadership has said that it is on the same page with the PM on his declared India policy. We lost our best chance to normalise relations with India at the time of the Agra summit when General (retd) Musharraf tried to overreach by refusing to renounce militancy in return for a final settlement of the Kashmir issue.

Today, India has the chance of getting a most favourable settlement of all issues with Pakistan. It should grab the chance with both hands and free the teeming millions of the subcontinent from the perpetual fear of a war-in-the-offing and that, too, a nuclear one.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 16^th, 2013.

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