Bus Karo!

IN Opinion | 21/02/2005

While people-to-people contact is all very well, the real edifice to build is trade and investment between India and Pakistan.

                   Our weekly column on what the edit pages carry

You don’t say!

Darius Nakhoonwala

Last week, the Pakistani Army which, along with its sibling the ISI, substitutes for the Pakistani State, finally concluded that it would do no harm to run a bus service between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad, which is in Pakistan occupied Kashmir. The bus will across the Line of Control. The service starts from April 7.

"Thereby", wrote the Business Standard, "hangs a tale. Until 1952, only travels passes were required. Then Pakistan insisted on passports and India gave in after some resistance. Now when India said let us retain the passports, it was Pakistan which insisted on reverting to travel papers, claiming that a passport would allow India to claim that the LoC was an international border!"

That was why, wrote Dawn, the issue had been stuck since last year. It commended the flexibility shown by the two sides. Two sides? What flexibility did Pakistan show?  Does the fact that it agreed to let all Indians and not just Kashmiris to use the bus service constitute flexibility?

This is a well known Pakistani technique. It raises absurd objections, then "gives in" when India protests, and the world is expected to see this as a sign of its reasonableness. History is always forgotten.

The Indian Express once again made a fatuous point. Asking what should constitute progress in Indo-Pak relations, it said "any pact or proposal that in any way eases border crossings marks substantial progress…It proves that through open-minded negotiation, India and Pakistan can accommodate each other’s concerns."

It then went on to say "there is a short-sighted tendency to separate Indo-Pak engagement into people-to-people contact and official dialogue" and that "this decade amply demonstrates that officialdom cannot count off its successes in isolation. It needs visible endorsement from the people." This is like saying you should judge the quality and outcome of, say, a cricket match by the number of people who attend the game instead of the skills of the opposing teams.

The Hindu used a peculiar argument. "In pushing humanitarian considerations to the fore, the two Governments signalled a clear intent to normalise relations between the peoples of India and Pakistan…it was emphasised that the opening up of the LoC for a humanitarian purpose will not prejudice the stated positions of the two countries on the Jammu and Kashmir issue."

The Telegraph also waxed lyrical. "For people on both sides, the psychological and emotional significance of the decision to open up a route unused for 58 years is overwhelming. All they need is an entry permit, not a passport." The Hindustan Times, surprisingly, was less over-the-top. Very good, it said, high time, too, but it confined itself to the bus service and didn’t drawn any cosmic conclusions about Indo-Pal relations.

It was also left to a columnist in the Business Standard to ruminate that while a bus was fine, until lorries and freight trains started to ply between India and Pakistan, there really wasn’t all that much to cheer about. Official trade between India and Pakistan is not even $500 million, while unofficial trade which is routed through Dubai, is around $2 billion.

No other newspaper, either in India or in Pakistan, thought it important to say that while people-to-people contact is all very well, the real edifice that the two countries should build is trade and investment between them.

The fact, as the experience of others placed in a similar situation shows is the guff about people-to-people contact is just that: guff. Whether it is North and South Korea, East and West Berlin, Cuba and Miami, the two Yemen or whatever, diplomacy is conducted between nation states, not estranged people.

Our newspapers, though aware of this, never seem to take it into account. As this column pointed out last week, the problem is not India or Pakistan as countries, but the Army and the ISI in Pakistan. They are the State in Pakistan.

The rest is fiction.