Commentary/Mani Shankar Aiyar

50 years after Partition we need to signal that we are no longer stuck in the mental grooves of the past

We can leave it to Nawaz Sharief's partners in the Sindh government, the MQM, spokesparty of the Mohajir quam, to pressurise him into reversing his predecessor's idiotic decision to close the Indian consulate-general in Karachi. But even if he does not, Gujral should now move on the proposal he congratulated me on selling to the standing committee on external affairs (over the head of chairman Vajpayee's muted objections) to open a visa office at the Wagah-Attari border to issue visas on the spot to Pakistanis traveling by train.

I got the proposal through by pointing out that in my time in Karachi, based on Black Book entries, we were denying visas to only around 2 out of 1,000 applicants. The last Indians consul-general in Karachi confirmed to the committee that the percentage of rejections - 0.2 per cent - had remained more or less the same over the years.

The fact is that Pakistanis wanting to stoke terrorism in India do not apply to us for visas; they get theirs from the ISI. We merely end up harassing innocents. Why, therefore, can we not help Pakistanis, especially less well-off Pakistanis, avoid the expense and rigmarole of first going all the way to Islamabad for their visas and then making the long, circuitous journey through two Punjabs before reaching their friends and relatives in the approximately 300 districts of India, spread from Rajasthan to Tamil Nadu, where they go?

As also to make other alternations in visa regulations to bring the Pakistani visitor on par with other visitors in regard to the welcome they receive in our country?

We really need to signal that 50 years after Partition we are no longer stuck in the mental grooves of the past. We also need to recognise that it is only ease of travel that will bring Pakistans other than the Sindh-based Mohajir to our country. The Mohajir comes not to see us but his kith and kin. We need to get both him and other Pakistanis to wake up to the real India.

Zee TV has done more to bring the real India to the drawing rooms of the Pakistanis than all the tortured efforts of the foreign office over 50 years. But there is little point in awakening the Pakistani mind, imagination and interest through satellite television to the real India without encouraging, even enticing the Pakistani-in-the-street (not to mention the Pakistani-in-the-burkha) to come and see for him/herself.

Visas will cater to a Pakistani need. We also need to harness Pakistani greed. Trade builds the most enduring ties. It also builds a lobby with a vested interest in Pak-India co-operation, if not friendship. The example of Bangladesh is instructive. There, when we had a friend in high office, Sheikh Mujbur Rahman, he crumbled at the knees to the anti-India lobby when our exports to BD reached a mere Rs 30 million.

When, under Khaleda Zia's BNP, the anti-India lobby got into power, it screamed its head off with anti-Indian and, worse, anti-Hindu rubbish, but filled its pockets by raising imports from India to Rs 30 billion. Middle-class materialism may still undo the damage that perverted spiritualism inflicted on peoples in 1947.

And can't we straightway get Siachen out of the way?

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