| 22 September 2004 | Wednesday | 06 Shaban 1425 |
A strange resolution
Silk Route Festival
The ongoing composite dialogue between India and Pakistan has reached a critical point as the stage is now set for the meeting between President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session in New York later this week.
The two leaders have been very positive about the forthcoming summit and are expected to give a direction to the dialogue which began in January. The vital need at the moment is to keep the process going.
Obviously dramatic results cannot be achieved overnight and there may be pitfalls and hidden fissures along the way of the negotiating process, which normally has its share of ups and downs.
But if the talks are sustained with patience and perseverance, the obstacles that may come up can be gradually overcome and progress made. One has therefore every reason to feel reasonably hopeful about the dialogue which has so far weathered quite a few polemical outbursts from both sides.
But can we take any more chances? The problem is that the talks have raised high hopes about quick results. There are also the hardliners on both sides who lose no time in pressing their governments to produce a solution of their liking.
In Pakistan this means that the dispute over Kashmir should be taken up immediately and a solution based on the will of the majority in the disputed state found.
Such expectations are unrealistic as are the aspirations of the hardliners in India that Pakistan should without any waste of time accept New Delhi's stand on the dispute and agree to a settlement based on the partition of the state.
Hence common sense demands that neither side attempt to cross the bridges before they reach them while keeping the pace of the dialogue steady. It is important that the governments on both sides should not allow themselves to be pushed into positions which can jeopardize the dialogue.
At the same time, they should try to expedite the pace of the peace process in areas which are not particularly controversial. For instance, the pace can be quickened in the reopening of the consulates in Karachi and Mumbai, opening the Khokhrapar rail route, and starting the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service.
Some of these are not even politically sensitive and by quarrelling over them the governments on the two sides can only send a wrong message about the prospects ahead.
For instance, take the timeframe question. A lot of breath has been wasted on it. True, nobody wants the dialogue to be an open-ended process. But quibbling over procedural and semantic issues, such as the definition of the timeframe - whether it should be broad or specific - will not help either.
Experience of peace processes in other parts of the world has shown that timeframes are usually not adhered to and negotiations can drag on for years before something substantive comes out of them.
President Musharraf has promised result-oriented talks and this is what should be aimed at. This means that the two leaders should not play to the gallery, should be discreet in their public utterances on India-Pakistan ties and should keep the dialogue on a low key. Once out of the glare of the media, the peace process may prove to be fruitful. At least there are fewer chances of its being derailed.
A strange resolution
One is amazed by the resolution passed on Monday by the NWFP Assembly asking the federal government to stop having women's photographs on passports and national identity cards.
Instead, it has asked the government to use a woman's high school or birth certificate to verify her age. Many women, the resolution said, could not get the computerized NICs because in their case Nadra could not issue the cards without photographs.
The resolution seems to ignore the fact that the literacy rate among women in the NWFP, as in the rest of the country, is low, and a majority of them have never been to a high school.
As for birth certificates, most births take place in remote villages which have no hospitals or maternity homes. This way a large number of women would not be able to supply to Nadra either a school or a birth certificate. Thus hundreds of thousands of women would go without NICs and passports.
The resolution does not say whether religious considerations are behind this demand that defies common sense. Passports carry the holders' photographs the world over. This way alone can immigration authorities check the identity of a person entering or leaving a country.
The resolution seems ridiculous because women going to Saudi Arabia to perform Hajj must travel on passports with photographs. Also, besides passports, pilgrims to the holy land have to carry several other documents relating to foreign exchange and their stay in Mina.
All these documents must carry women's pictures. If photographs on travel documents were un-Islamic, surely Saudi Arabia would be the first to ban them. In fact, it is inconceivable that the Saudi immigration would let any woman enter their country without a proper passport.
It is a pity that the NWFP assembly should pass such pointless resolutions that have nothing to do with the people's welfare. Since they have been elected to the assembly to work for the betterment of their electors, one would expect the NWFP legislators to make laws and draw up policies that would help improve the quality of life of their women voters and enable them to have greater access to education and health care.
Silk Route Festival
The announcement by the Northern Areas' administration that this year's week-long Silk Route Festival will be held from September 22 to 28 is good news. Hopes for holding the event were earlier dampened by the unrest in Gilgit during the summer over the controversial school syllabus.
Coming at the tail end of summer, the Silk Route Festival serves as a grand annual mela attracting tourists to the scenic region from within the country and outside. The economic activity thus generated by the festival is a lifeline for many small traders and hundreds of cottage industry workers who, in their distant mountain abodes, are forced to spend the long winter months in virtual isolation from the rest of the country.
Given some degree of government patronage, the festival has a lot of potential for developing into a major event but such patronage has unfortunately been lacking.
The Gilgit and Hunza valleys, as the venue of the festival, are replete with historical relics dating back to the pre-historic and Buddhist eras, local folklore woven around these, handicraft traditions, some of the tallest mountains amid the most spectacular of sceneries in the world as well as indigenously developed tourism facilities bearing an exotic touch of colour and tradition.
This year was also the Year of the K2, harking back to the historical scaling of the world's second highest mountain peak fifty years ago. But, like the Year of the Nanga Parbat - dubbed as the 'killer' mountain - last year, the tourism department and the authorities concerned failed to showcase the events to the outside world.
It is, for a large part, owing to such negligence and acts of omission that Pakistan is unable to realize its immense tourism potential. The government needs to do more in this field if it is serious about bolstering the country's image abroad as well as boosting the earnings from tourism.