ISLAMABAD, Dec 31: Pakistan-India bilateral trade, which increased to $2billion a year from $835million in 2004 due to peace process started by former President Musharraf, has again fallen prey to repercussions of the Mumbai carnage.

The Indian High Commission has already increased the minimum visa process time for Pakistani businesspersons to three months since Dec 15 from less than a week earlier. Governments in both the countries have already started conveying to their private businessmen to remain cautious while investing.

Economic and political experts at a discussion on “The Sub-Continent: Peace in Peril” here on Wednesday warned that the financial outcomes of the Mumbai’s carnage will start unfolding within the next two months.

By April, they said, businessmen on both sides will be able to clearly see the economic fallout of the 59 hours militants’ rampant carnage that started on Nov 27 all over some vintage points in Mumbai and which left nearly 200 dead and over 300 wounded.

Organised by the Islamabad-based Centre for Research and Security Study (CRSS), the participants asked both the governments to not lose what they had gained from the peace process over the last few years and that the ultimate beneficiaries of increased tension between the two neighbours will be the extremist elements in both the countries.

Waqar Sheikh, a young business consultant formerly associated with the SAARC Chambers of Commerce and Industries, said that decline in purchase orders of the Pakistani cement by Indians was also one of the signs that import and exports between the two neighbours had already started suffering.

He said the Mumbai terror incidents adversely impacted the private business contacts on both sides.

Lt-Gen (retd) Talat Masood, Nirupama Subramaniam, and Dr Farrukh Saleem also spoke.