The longing for peace

A VERY CHEERING message that there is a lot more which unites rather than divides the peoples of India and Pakistan has come recently from two wholly different quarters. There might have been nothing worthy of much notice in the call from Admiral Ramdas, former chief of the Indian Navy, for an immediate ceasefire along the Line of Control between Pakistan and India as it is the kind of pronouncement generally made by the heads of armed forces who know very well the agony inflicted on the people by the waging of wars of attrition apart from the huge cost they extract from the economies of the countries concerned. The significance of the Admiral's speech is that it was made at the first Eqbal Ahmed Memorial Lecture in Islamabad and the warmth of the reception given to it by the Pakistani audience. The other telling indication of the longing in Pakistan for living in peace and goodwill with India came from Ms. Asma Jehangir, leader of the visiting 60-member delegation of Pakistani women, in her passionate pleas for the ending of hostility between the two countries.

Indications that the vivisection of pre-independent India and the communal riots which bled the divided countries in 1947, and would remain burnt into the memory of those who had witnessed them, have not estranged them have in fact never been lacking. Within less than two years of the partition of India, at a conference of the editors of newspapers of India and Pakistan, there was total unanimity on the need for both the countries to live in peace and harmony. A striking illustration of the yearning for harmonious relations with India among the people of Pakistan was not merely the virtual absence of anger or bitterness towards the Indian Army among the soldiers and the senior officers of the Pakistan army after its defeat in Bangladesh in 1971. The longing for a return to an old friendship sundered by partition could be seen from the touching cordiality on several occasions.

There were good reasons to believe that Pakistan's war-weariness and its readiness to bury the hatchet had left it in the right state of mind for signing the 1972 Shimla Agreement with India and to agree to having the Line of Control in Kashmir virtually as an international border though this might never have been so clearly spelt out. The hawks were, however, always hovering around to see that this did not happen. If the stinging humiliation over its having lost Bangladesh still rankles the psyche of the ruling Pakistani establishment, the external environment changing from one extreme to the other during the half century has also worked against Pakistan's living without any complexes against India. The choice of Pakistan way back in 1953 by the United States as its ally during the Cold War and its enrolment as a signatory to the South-East Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO) while India was forging very friendly relations with the erstwhile Soviet Union ensured that the tensions in the subcontinent stayed alive. This privileged relationship lasted long enough for Islamabad until the Cold War ended. Apart from just being pleasantly surprised, New Delhi might indeed have been astonished when Washington held Pakistan responsible for the Kargil crisis. It will be wholly in its interest for Pakistan to respond to the appeal of Admiral Ramdas, made in Islamabad itself, to end terrorism and militancy in Kashmir. The pleas of Ms. Jehangir to restore peace and harmony between the two countries should be heeded as the voice of sanity in the subcontinent.

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