KARACHI, May 10: In the presence of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of India and Pakistan, the region cannot return to normalcy, nor arms races of all kinds can stop accelerating which will worsen economic condition of the masses on both sides.
This was stated by intellectuals, journalists and peace activists in a statement issued on the fourth anniversary of the six nuclear test explosions in Pokhran Mountains on May 11 and 13, 1998.
Terming it a reminder of the grim confirmation of the worst fears they had expressed then and on subsequent occasions, the speakers pointed out that except for a brief interlude of the Lahore bus diplomacy or the Lahore peace process, India and Pakistan had not known a moment of peace or normal relations.
“While the Kargil operation aborted the Lahore peace process — that appeared to have aimed at writing agreed ground rules for managing the inevitable nuclear arms race in accordance with the usual realpolitik — events since then have described a vicious cycle of accelerating arms race, military tensions and communalisation and sectarianisation of politics.
Today, both countries are in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation all along the common or working borders, ready to fight an all-out war at the slightest miscalculation, accident or escalation. Such a war itself can quickly degenerate into the very first nuclear war the world has ever seen,” they observed.
The speakers said that the most fearful consequences of the arms race were political: all arms races and military confrontations, specially with nuclear sabre rattling, promote a sick kind of jingoistic nationalism that welcomes war and destruction.
“This kind of politics not only worsens all indicators of human development, specially intensifying poverty, they degrade democracy, human rights observance and the political culture. The subcontinent and its teeming millions deserve better than a senseless and utterly-destructive war that can easily bring on a nuclear winter over large swathes of its territories.
They called upon the government of Pakistan to muster moral courage to defuse tensions and sharply reduce active military confrontation by taking suitable and necessary unilateral steps towards establishing a regime of peace and friendship in South Asia.
Pakistan has no reason to blindly follow what India does or says, they said.
India’s militarist thinking at the expense of its people needs to be exposed and shown how it has degraded politics, specially secularism, quality of democracy and human rights observances.
Let Pakistan follow an entirely different course, favouring the resumption of people-to-people reconciliation, cultural exchanges and wholehearted regional cooperation, they stated.
“Pakistan’s diplomacy must recover the moral high ground of working for the NWFZ in South Asia and the Indian Ocean and its littorals.
Signatories to the statement included Zamir Niazi, M.B. Naqvi, Zahida Hina, Karamat Ali, B.M. Kutty, Yusuf Mustikhan, Usman Baloch, Baseer Naveed, Fareed Awan, Jauher Husain, Sharafat Ali, Muqtida Mansoor, Shahid Faiz and Hasan Athar.