KARACHI, Nov 11: The visiting Indian peace activist, Admiral Ramu Ramdas (retd), has called for restoring communication links between India and Pakistan so that people-to-people contact between the two South Asian neighbours can be revived.

Speaking at Karachi Press Club on Monday, he said this would facilitate the people in the two countries to get first-hand information about each other which in turn would clear the cloud of mistrust and prejudices that had formed over a period of more than five decades.

He said the vested interests in both the countries did not want that the people should get correct information, and emphasized that rail, road and air links be restored. People should understand who benefited from tensions between the two countries, he added.

He said vested interests were creating the scare of war in both the countries to divert the attention of the people from the real issues such as poverty, hunger and disease.

“Fact have been distorted in history and textbooks in both the countries which create hatred in young and developing minds. So joint teams of historians and scholars be formed which, after sufficient research, should write correct history and remove errors and misconceptions,” he emphasized.

Admiral Ramdas, who is also the chief of the Pakistan-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy, said the older generation in the two countries had not taken correct decisions and the consequences were being faced by the present generation. He expressed the hope that the young generation would be brought up in an atmosphere that promoted the feeling of love and fraternity among nations, saying the new generation in India and Pakistan free from prejudices and misconceptions would live in peace and harmony with each other like responsible neighbours.

He suggested that all issues between the two countries be frozen for a couple of decades. When this was done and relations normalized, peoples of the two countries would come closer, and they would understand each other, which would help resolve the issues in a congenial atmosphere.

He said now in Pakistan efforts were under way to form government and in a few months’ time elections would be held in several states of India, so dialogue between the two countries would resume after a few months, and after that a summit meeting could take place.

Admiral Ramdas, who is also the chief of the Pakistan-India Soldiers Initiative for Peace, said the two countries spent huge amounts on defence, but after friendly relations were established defence expenditures would come down drastically. The amount thus saved could be spent on the development of social sector facilities such as health and education, which now was not getting its due share.

He claimed that steps being taken by various quarters to promote peace were not getting due coverage in the media while news about increasing tensions were being highlighted and given more space, and said the media should highlight the peace initiatives in order to help create an environment conducive to peace and harmony.

He said nuclear bombs were weapons of mass destruction, militarily inefficient, morally and ethically indefensible, politically counter-productive and economically disastrous, and suggested that the two countries announced a nuclear freeze and also that nuclear weapons were just a deterrence and would never be used. He was of the view that Pakistan would have gained more if it had not carried out nuclear tests.

Earlier, Karachi Press Club President Sabihuddin Ghausi said in recent years German unification has taken place, the European Union has come into being, relations between South Korea and North Korea are improving, so we should be hopeful about normalization of relations between Pakistan and India.

The KPC Secretary, Najeeb Ahmed, also spoke on the occasion.

Admiral Ramdas also answered a few questions after his talk.