‘Pakistan, India need to move towards cooperative equilibrium’

Karachi
Indian High Commissioner in Pakistan Dr TCA Raghavan said on Wednesday that New Delhi and Islamabad needed to move from non-cooperative equilibrium to cooperative equilibrium.
Pakistan and India, being direct neighbours, must have a durable peace, free from wrangling that was claiming a heavy toll of the creativity of both countries, he said while addressing staff, students and media at the Habib University on Wednesday evening on the subject of ‘History and diplomacy: contextualising India-Pakistan relations’.
Raghavan said that even if the two countries “cannot live together, let’s learn to live together separately”.
He said nobody could deny that the act of partition in 1947 had weighed heavily on the collective psyche of both countries, and had affected the following two or three generations.
However, relations did begin to inch forward in 1951 with the Test cricket series followed by the Indus Waters Treaty. He termed the Indus Waters Treaty “a real triumph for diplomacy”.
The Indian high commissioner was of the view that both countries should stand back from contemporary events and take a wider view of things to evolve harmonious relations.
He divided the issues into two portfolios. In portfolio one, he placed the Jammu and Kashmir issue, the water dispute and the Balochistan situation. In portfolio two, he included sports, cultural heritage and
its development, and the challenges of development.
“India and Pakistan would certainly agree on portfolio two,” he said.
“Relations between neighbours always have their hiccups. We needn’t descend into India-Pakistan exceptionalism.”
“History always continues to have an effect on the present,” Raghavan said, and in this case quoted the current events in Turkey which, he said, were the effects of the events of a hundred years ago. Then he cited the US-Soviet differences up until the end of the Cold War even though both were allies in World War II.
“History has an important bearing on the state of the current relations,” he said.
Citing bilateral relations, he said that at one end of the spectrum, there were the US-Canada relations which were the epitome of cordiality, and at the other were the ties between the two Koreas marked by extreme acrimony. He said it was for India and Pakistan to opt for a model from either of the two, and the choice should not be difficult.
Raghavan said 1979 was a watershed year not only in the history of the region but globally too. During this year, there was the Islamic Revolution in Iran which had no precedent. Then, he said, there was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, accompanied by many decisive steps in Pakistan.
He stated that the forces of globalisation transformed the markets globally, there was the China-Vietnam dispute, the year had a great impact on South Asia, and as a result of this a change had been let loose and there was going to be a different regional environment.
Technology, he said, had made great strides and things like the Internet and other information technology instruments were bringing the people of India and Pakistan closer. “The influence of the government in forming opinions on both sides of the divide is waning,” he said.
He said another issue that made ties between the two countries complicated was the issue of “terrorism and extremism”.
He said that it was the people on both sides who had to be empowered to decide the fate and the future of both countries.
Raghavan said there were building blocks, including the Simla Accord of 1972, the Lahore Declaration of 2000 and the Islamabad Declaration of 2004, which could help start mending the bilateral ties.