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
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
This is a well known Pakistani technique. It raises absurd objections, then "gives in" when
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,
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
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
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
Our newspapers, though aware of this, never seem to take it into account. As this column pointed out last week, the problem is not
The rest is fiction.