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| Friendship with Pakistan just not possible | | | Rustam
JAMMU, Mar 24: Initiating discussion on the demands for grants of the departments under the Chief Minister, PDP MLA and former Deputy Chief Minister Muzzaffar Hussain Beig, inter-alia, advocated the need for dialogue with Pakistan to find a solution to the Kashmir issue. A pious idea. What the question is: Is dialogue with Pakistan or if friendship between India and Pakistan is possible? The answer simply cannot be in the affirmative.
Our 63 years' experience with Pakistan, including the three full-scale wars in 1947-48, 1965 and 1971 and the current nearly 22-year-old low-cost, low-intensity, but extremely deadly, proxy war on the Indian soil (which so far has claimed approximately 50,000 lives, rendered more than three lakh Kashmiri Hindus homeless and mutilated not only the Valley but also parts of Doda, Rajouri, Poonch, and even Jammu and Samba districts in Jammu province) should vanish any lingering expectations of an Indo-Pak friendship unless the authorities in the South Block are willing to withdraw from Jammu and Kashmir and allow its merger with Pakistan.
So far we have on our own shown several goodwill gestures to Pakistan, hoping that it would change and not do anything to generate a climate of violence in the Valley and elsewhere in the country to destabilize India, but without evoking any favourable response. All our unilateral friendly overtures have gone down the drain or have been construed as signs of our weakness. Do not the circumstances demand a review of the widely publicized "Gujral Doctrine", Vajpayee line and Manmohan approach or the policy of unilateral goodwill gestures?
Our strategy has proved counter-productive. What the Pakistani Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, did after 1972 Shimla Agreement is too well-known. He secured from his Indian counterpart Indira Gandhi as many concessions as possible like the release of over 90,000 surrendered soldiers, including Army Generals, and made, according to PN Dhar, a solemn pledge (not in writing) that in future Islamabad would desist from creating any trouble in Jammu and Kashmir and that the Line of Control would be converted into international border. Bhutto, everyone knows, took no time to turn out to be a fair-weather cock and sabotaged the efforts towards normalization of relations between the two countries. Pakistani rulers before and after Bhutto too acted likewise.
That the Pakistani rulers have all along construed our policy of goodwill gesture as sign of our weakness can also be seen from the fact that the friendly overtures (September 997) by Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral were followed almost immediately by heavy artillery shelling on the cent per cent Shia-dominated Kargil town and nearby villages in the frontier region of Ladakh from across the Line of Control by Pakistani troops, which damaged a Shia mosque, a hospital, bus stand and hotel, killing in the process 20 innocent civilians and inflicting fatal injuries to more than 30 others. Not only this, the Pakistani rangers opened unprovoked firing in the RS Pura sector of the Jammu province umpteen times obviously to teach the people of the border areas a lesson for their unflinching allegiance to India. (To be continued) —Early Times Report |
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