‘People-to-people contacts essential to improve Indo-Pak ties’

Karachi
Ensuring people-to-people contacts between India and Pakistan is an indispensable ingredient of normalisation of ties between the two countries.
This was the consensus among speakers at a seminar titled ‘Pakistan-India People’s Dialogue for Peace and Inter-Faith Harmony, which was held at the Jinnah Medical and Dental College on Saturday evening.
The seminar was held under the joint aegis of the Pakistan-India People’s Forum and the Pakistan Peace Coalition.
Asad Iqbal Butt, chairman of the Pakistan-India People’s Forum, said: “We have been working for peace between India and Pakistan for a long time despite threats of having our legs broken by hawkish elements. We have always endeavoured to cultivate peace despite being dubbed Indian agents.”
Similarly, Butt said, Indians who worked for the betterment of ties between the two countries were dubbed Pakistani agents.
Actually, he said, “we are just working to better the lot of the marginalised on both sides of the divide who have all these decades been taken for a ride by the governments of both countries by playing with their patriotic sentiments just to perpetuate themselves in the saddle”.
He lamented that so much was being spent on totally non-development expenditures with no schools for the large number of the uneducated, the poor, and no hospitals for the less privileged.
“Leaders in both countries have to be convinced that we don’t need an enemy. We are killing ourselves,” he said.
Butt decried the treatment being meted out to the minorities in Pakistan.
Mufti Muhammad Omer Abedin from India said, “For a thousand years, we all had lived happily together. There was absolutely no acrimony. Then there came a stage when our ways abruptly parted. However, if two brothers come to have separate dwellings, the tie of blood is not snapped. We have the same values, the same culture, yet we are glowering at each other as if to devour each other.”
He suggested a three-pronged strategy. On the political front, he said, there were elements in both countries that did not want to see peace in the subcontinent. Not swords but only dialogue could convince them of the benefits of cordiality for people on both sides of the divide.
As for the media, he regretted that the media in both countries were giving a very inflammatory trend to the situation. He suggested that anti-Pakistan journalists in India be given visas to visit Pakistan and the love and sympathy to be given to them by the people would certainly change their thinking.
Thirdly, he said, there were international conspiracies to retain the gulf between India and Pakistan by quarters like international arms merchants.
Speaking in chaste Urdu despite being a Sikh, Sardar Nanak Singh Nishtar said that both countries had to change the collective psyche in their countries and, to that end, conciliatory bodies in both countries must meet regularly.
Dr Tipu Sultan, president of the Pakistan-India people’s Forum’s Sindh chapter, said rulers on both sides had failed the masses miserably.
There was, he said, malnutrition, 60 percent of the population on both sides had no access to modern sanitation, infant mortality rate in both countries was 80 per thousand, and per-capita spending in Pakistan on health was 0.5 percent of the GDP and on education 1.2 percent of the GDP.
“To get rid of these drawbacks, we should involve the stakeholders, namely, the civil society.”
Besides, Sultan said, there should be a marked increase in trade between the two countries as that would create more job opportunities and ease the situation for the commonfolk, especially in the case of medicines as the prices of drugs in India was only a tenth of what they were in Pakistan.