NEW DELHI, April 11: Indian Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon on Wednesday invoked the memory of Mohammad Ali Jinnah to urge Pakistan to overcome a “vision deficit” in bilateral ties with Delhi.
Speaking at a seminar here on India-Pakistan conflict and its resolution, Mr Menon said while Indian leaders had on several occasions expressed a vision of where they want ties with Pakistan to be headed, Islamabad had not stated its views clearly.
Indian leaders, most notably Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, had expressed a clear view on the subject -- in Dr Singh's case as recently as in March in Amritsar.
“I am not aware of a similar description of Pakistan’s larger or longer-term vision for a relationship with India apart from Jinnah’s wish that Pakistan should be to India as Canada is to the USA,” Mr Menon said.
“Does this vision deficit matter? It matters because even the issues that divide us would be easier to solve if one had a common goal or purpose or vision of the sort of relationship that we wish to build in the future.”
Mr Menon, a former high commissioner to Islamabad, shared his own impressions of some popular, but not necessarily correct notions that are harboured by Indians and Pakistanis about each other.
“In Pakistan, for instance, I have heard three kinds of arguments that seek to explain the unsatisfactory nature of our relations: “One might be called the foundation myth. This believes that India wants to undo Partition, is inveterately hostile to Pakistan, and attempts through hegemonic behaviour to destroy Pakistan. I am afraid that this argument flies in the face of the reality of the last sixty years and of India's evident self-interest…India sincerely believes that a stable, prosperous and moderate Pakistan is in the interest of India and the subcontinent.”
Mr Menon said a second argument in Pakistan revolves round the asymmetry in size, power and development between the two countries, which makes India-Pakistan hostility inevitable.
“This is a rather strange argument since no two states in the world are evenly matched or identical. In fact it is the differences between them that create the complementarities that allow them to work, live and trade together. Nor do much greater asymmetries with Pakistan's other partners like the US and Western Europe and China prevent Pakistan from working with them.”
In Pakistan, the Kashmir issue is sometimes used to argue that India-Pakistan hostility is inevitable. Kashmir is sometimes even described as the unfinished business of Partition, or as a reflection of a fundamental religious divide between two communities that cannot live together.
“This is patently false, as over thirteen centuries of Islam in the subcontinent prove,” Mr Menon said.
“It is the mixture of politics in the sphere of religion that has made differences over issues like Kashmir incendiary.”
