The true facts are here in this article. Ignore Indians verbal diarrhea on this forum.
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All those who support better ties with India should oppose the Zardari-Gilani government’s recent initiative to liberalise trade with our eastern neighbour.
The reason is simple. Any attempt to undercut Pakistani interests will backfire on the long run and harm future prospects for peace. It is a myth that we are not trading with India. The existing levels of trade between us are promising and sufficient. The Indian MFN status to Pakistan is largely on paper and is yet to be translated into reality. The concessions hurriedly granted by President Zardari will actually harm Pakistan.
There is credible evidence that Zardari’s rush toward India is linked to giving that country trade access to Afghanistan. His allies in Washington have been lobbying him on this count for some time. Acting quietly, he already has opened the Karachi port to Indian wheat. All of this is happening without reciprocation using misleading arguments.
Let’s take Siachen, where the bodies of more than 135 of our soldiers and civilians lie buried after the massive weekend landslide. India’s aggressive anti-Pakistan posture is responsible for this and other tragedies in our region. Kashmir is in dispute since 1948 and yet Pakistan never placed troops there. We are in Siachen today because, without provocation, India raised the stakes in 1984 by occupying the peaks on the glaciers.
The only logical reason why India did so was to raise the cost of military readiness for Pakistan. India can afford to show generosity to its smaller western neighbour if it wishes to do so. Instead, New Delhi chooses to escalate. It invaded Pakistan unprovoked in 1971 when we were busy in elections and our military was in the barracks. It detonated nuclear bombs in 1974 right next to Pakistan’s eastern border, when it could have picked any other location inside its vast dominion. And it exploited the Soviet and now the American occupations of Afghanistan to use that nation’s soil to arm and feed insurgencies against us.
Former president Pervez Musharraf bent backwards to appease India for a deal on Kashmir. His concessions were breathtakingly unprecedented. That process, called the Composite Dialogue, ran from 2004 to 2008. Even then India failed to move on even the easiest things to resolve: small border disputes like Siachen. Both Pakistani and Indian negotiators finalised a win-win deal. A document was ready to be signed. But India kept delaying until Musharraf left power.
India’s aggressive anti-Pakistan posture beats logic. It continues to ban Pakistani cricket players on its soil. Our artists who choose to visit India are often harassed and sometimes beaten up by Indian extremists. Indian officials, intelligentsia and others continue to demonise Pakistan’s rise in 1947 as an independent country, and many Indians are fed a regular diet of a theory that Pakistan and India were somehow the same country in a unified nation, which is a myth because such a unified country never existed for centuries.
The United States needs India in Afghanistan. That is not possible without using Pakistani roads, ports and skies. Our American friends keep telling us India is not a threat. But most of India’s $40 billion defence budget and weapons point toward Pakistan. Our people welcome the Indians here. But when some 60 Pakistanis believed Indian peace declarations and travelled to New Delhi in a ‘peace train’ in 2007, they were burned alive near the Indian capital by Hindu extremists.
It would be fair to blame India for the needless military deployments that we have to make in a place like Siachen. Indians are good people and we can have the best of political and trade relations with them. But India’s ruling elite refuses to budge on small issues. Indian planners have the world’s biggest concentration of poverty and disease and other social ills like AIDS and female infanticide and underage girl marriages. These planners also have more than $300 billion in India’s savings account. But this wealth is not shared with India’s poor.
Siachen is a reminder that India has yet to meet us halfway for peace. While normal trade between us should continue at existing pace, where India has exported goods worth $1.7 billion to Pakistan last year, we should not opt for unilateral concessions like President Zardari is doing until the other side sincerely reciprocates.
