May 27, 2003	Tuesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 24,1424

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ISLAMABAD, May 26: Scholars, during the inaugural session of a two-day-long peace seminar, on Monday criticized radical elements in both Pakistan and India for allegedly jeopardising regional harmony and democracy.

The seminar, apparently part of the latest peace moves between Pakistan and India, was titled ‘Current Domestic Policy Challenges and Prospects in South Asia’ and was jointly organised by Islamabad-based Institute of Regional Studies and Germany’s Hanns Seidel Foundation.

Inaugurating the seminar, federal finance minister Shaukat Aziz termed the region’s countries “victims of mistrust.”

The first session on India was punctuated by calls for concerted efforts for defeating Hindu nationalism in India and religious extremism in Pakistan.

Discussion, on the occasion, ranged between topics of Indian secularism, the rise of the Hindu revivalism, last year’s massacre of Muslims in the Indian State of Gujarat and the Kashmiri struggle against the Indian rule.

Niaz A. Naik, a leading Pakistani figure of the track-II diplomacy, chaired the session and described the seminar as being part of an effort towards mutual understanding.

“We must understand each, know each other ... to have a harmonious South Asia,” he said.

A brief second session, chaired by Nepal’s ambassador to Pakistan Pushkarman Singh Rabhandari, discussed the Maoist insurgency in Nepal and the status of the current peace talks there.

A former diplomat and member of the Indian parliament belonging to the opposition Congress party, Mani Shankar Aiyar, rejected revivalist “forces of Hiduvta, saying: “India’s destiny has to be a secular destiny,” adding that the majority of Hindus rejected the view that India was exclusively — or even primarily — for its majority Hindu population.

Stressing the need to fight “terrorism, “ a former professor of politics of the University of Mumbai, Mr P. M. Kamath, urged policy-makers, intelligentsia and activist groups to “equally commit themselves to democracy” because, he said, democracies “do not go to war against one another”.

He said nuclearisation of both India and Pakistan should promote a live-and-let-live policy in the region but added: “Only democratically-elected ... governments can exercise necessary restraint in the use of nuclear weapons”.

Irfan Engineer, one of the directors of the Mumbai-based Centre for Study of Society and Secularism and associate editor of the Indian Journal of Secularism, attributed the dispute over Kashmir for being “partly responsible” for the rise of revivalist Hindutva.

“We have to object to both the ideology of Hindutva and Islamic extremism,” he said. Otherwise, he added, there would be no peace in the region.

Dr Usha Thakkar, director of the Institute of Research on Gandhian Thought and Rural Development, said that the BJP electoral victory in the Indian state of Gujarat following last year’s massacres was “a grim reminder of what lies in store” for India if its citizens did not engage in what she called a battle for secularism. “Concerted efforts by citizens, voluntary agencies and political groups can do a lot to save the situation (there),” she said.