Tuesday, Feb 11, 2003
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By B. Muralidhar Reddy
The main reason for the worsening scenario between the two countries was the widening gulf between Pakistan's military establishment and the people in general over the improvement of relations with India, Mr. Vyas felt. He said the conflict arose as the Pakistan establishment made deliberate attempts to drift away from the commonalties of cultures that bind India and Pakistan. "Pakistan, however, has drifted politically very far away from these commonalties. It is this conflict between political stance and its cultural ethos that has resulted in the kind of policies that Pakistan exhibits today. The two are not gelling together and this is one of the reasons why Pakistan exhibited the compulsive hostility towards India." He said "the perception of the Pakistani people towards India is more relaxed than that of the military but 50 years of distorted education has had an impact on the population too... The majority of Pakistan, I think, would be willing to work towards improvement in Indo-Pak relations. A representative government in Pakistan would perhaps reflect that ethos. But the military establishment in Pakistan would think otherwise. The voice of the people hardly gets expression in its foreign policy.'' "On the contrary, the representative opinion of the Indian people is clearly reflected in the Indian Government's policies towards Pakistan. We have witnessed that in the past years when India has tried to build a workable relationship with Pakistan for the welfare of both the people. The contradiction lies here. The efforts to improve relations were constantly thwarted here," he said. Mr. Vyas admitted that `the space was limited" when it came to the role that diplomats could play in this scenario. "Diplomats can try and understand the dynamics of the relations between the two countries, which would help in designing policies that would help better relations," he said. Mr. Vyas, who hit the headlines last month when his car was blockaded en route a diplomatic function leading to strong protests by India, described his stint here as a "roller coaster ride" with the flip side being the obsession of the local intelligence agencies to prevent local people from meeting Indian diplomats. "There are restrictions on your movement. The surveillance you are subjected to limits the kind of friendships one would like to develop in Pakistan,' he said. A keen bird watcher and gold medallist of the IIT, Kanpur, Mr. Vyas said one of the exciting and memorable moments of his stay was when he discovered that the `Crimson Sun bird', a very Indian bird found in the Himalayan foothills, was coming to the greens of Islamabad in the winters. The bird is not officially listed among the birds found in Pakistan. A regular contributor to the prestigious journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, he felt that fewer restrictions on Indian diplomats here might have led to more such discoveries.
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