India cannot become a global power if it does not resolve its issues with Pakistan while domestic social and economic compulsions of both the country had necessitated improvement in their mutual relations.
This was stated by former foreign minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri while speaking at a roundtable organised by the Institute of Regional Studies (IRS) on Wednesday.
“Not even a single political party of Pakistan is against the peace process with India,” he said while appreciating Pakistan’s decision, in principle, to grant most-favourite nation (MFN) status to India. He, however, added that India also needed to remove the plethora of non-tariff barriers that the Pakistani exporters were facing.
Kasuri said that contrary to the general perception in the west, the Pakistani military also supported the peace process. He added though the approach of the military toward India had relatively hardened over the past few years because of excessive Indian involvement in Afghanistan. He opined aspirations of the Kashmiris needed to be considered as a priority for the resolution of the Kashmir issue. He said the first two things that the Kashmiris wanted were withdrawal of the Indian troops from the Valley and reversal of the efforts on the part of the Indian government to reduce it to a normal state under its constitution.
Foreign policy analyst, Dr Tanvir Ahmed Khan, warned Indian eagerness toward the dialogue process with Pakistan could wane if the government in Pakistan was unstable. He also added that India was pretending to be bigger in size, which was preventing it from engaging in a serious dialogue process with Pakistan. Some speakers also called for revisiting the Indus Water Treaty, not in terms of abrogating it altogether, but just to review it in the light of the changing ecological situation in the region.
