India, Pakistan have vision deficit: foreign secy
The Times of India, April 12, 2007
NEW DELHI: India and Pakistan have a "vision deficit" which prevents the two countries from working out a peace paradigm based on shared goals and strategies, foreign secretary Shiv Shankar Menon said while laying out India's grand strategy in dealing with Pakistan on a broader canvas than the oft-repeated twin concerns of terrorism and Kashmir.
In an address to Jamia Millia Islamia, Menon said India had been doing a lot of "out of the box" thinking that Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf demands.
From India's perspective, this includes more dialogue and more contact, which the peace process and CBMs provide. "It requires strict non-interference in each other's internal affairs," Menon said, indicating no one was working on a clean slate on this issue.
It involves opening trade and transit and a $1 billion trade is testimony to its benefits. It even involves working together in Afghanistan rather than at cross-purposes. It involves more popular contact, more LoC crossings by families, among others.
But Pakistan, Menon said, needed to do more on terrorism, which continues. "The 2005 earthquake saw the rehabilitation and increasing public prominence of terrorist organisations," he added. He also debunked some of the "Pakistan" myths floating around in India.
First, Pakistan's alleged identity problem: at the popular level, he said, there was no hostility or revulsion for one another. Second, the Pakistan army needs the external threat of India to justify itself.
"Pakistan army's dominance over Pakistan's internal space has lasted for so many years and is so complete that it needs no external threat to justify it," he said.
Third, he rubbished the "communalism versus secularism" paradigm that is used to explain the unhappy relations between the two countries."
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