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India And Pakistan Businessmen To Cross Political Bridge
NEW DELHI, May 17 (News Agencies) - Indian and Pakistani business leaders will meet in Islamabad next week in an attempt to forge stronger trade ties and help ease political tensions between the two South Asian rivals.
The visit by a powerful Indian trade delegation between May 21st and May 24th has been cleared by both governments and will be the first significant meeting since an armed conflict in the Kargil region of Kashmir two years ago.
"It will mean that the deadlock in trade ties, after Kargil, will be broken," said an official of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), which is leading the 35-member business team.
The talks will be held under a joint forum called the Indo-Pakistan Chamber of Commerce and Industry (IPCCI) and are expected to cover cooperation in diverse industry sectors such as tea, pharmaceuticals and textiles.
In the Pakistani city of Karachi, IPCCI president Ilyas Bilour said that "despite the political tensions, we want to activate trade ties with India, letting the two governments do their own jobs."
"We could work together in developing information technology, textiles, agriculture and a large list of other sectors. There is a lot of scope between the two countries as we jointly form a market of over one billion people."
The joint trade forum was established during a historic bus trip undertaken by Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to the Pakistani city Lahore in February 1999 with the aim of relieving the tense relations between the two countries.
Three months after Vajpayee's visit, India and Pakistan went to the brink of a fourth war when New Delhi launched a full-scale offensive to repulse Pakistani-backed forces in the Indian zone of Kashmir.
Indian industry officials said they would lobby hard to warm the trade ties, which have been in cold storage since the Kashmir conflict.
"There is tremendous potential for trade as India's manufacturing sector makes almost everything while Pakistan's industrial base is weak," an Indian industry official said.
Both sides stand to gain as Pakistan relies on costly imports from other countries such as South Korea, Japan and the European Union.
Current bilateral trade stands at just 7.0 billion rupees ($150 million).
Indian industry officials said they would lobby hard to remove a list of just 600 items which can be legally exported by India to Pakistan, and seek equal status with other exporting nations.
Industry officials said illegal trade was two to three times greater than official trade because of the restrictions.
Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry president Zubair Motiwala said import restrictions on India were a major impediment to trade.
"Business and politics are two separate things," he said.
"There is not much scope for promotion of trade between the two countries in the presence of the mandatory list of 600 items which the Pakistani government allows to be imported from India."
Amit Mitra, secretary general of FICCI added that the Indian business team would try to revive the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) regional forum.
"In a significant move towards second track diplomacy with Pakistan, the FICCI delegation on May 22nd will participate in an executive committee meeting of SAARC chambers of commerce and industry," Mitra said.
"We will follow this up with a round of consultations with SAARC ambassadors the next day," added Mitra. "We hope these people-to-people contacts revive the fortunes of SAARC which has an important trade dimension."
South Asia's top foreign bureaucrats are due to meet in Colombo next month in a bid to revive their seven-member regional grouping, which has been fractured by Indo-Pakistan bickering.
SAARC comprises India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, the Maldives and Bhutan.
In the past two years, there has been no high-level meeting of SAARC.
The summit due in Nepal in 1999 was scuppered by India's reluctance to go into a meeting with Pakistan's military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf.
India and Pakistan have yet to resume diplomatic contacts following the Kashmir conflict.
This week, the Indian government said it was not averse to including Pakistan in a "graduated peace process" on Kashmir, the main cause of tension between the two countries since 1947.
In Kashmir, two civilians and 14 fighters were killed in separate incidents Thursday, Indian defense officials said.
Two civilians were killed and one injured in a bomb explosion at Gandherbal, 35 kilometers (21.7 miles) north of Kashmir's summer capital Srinagar, a police spokesman said.
According to the police, suspected Kashmiri fighters placed a bomb, hidden in a lunchbox, on the road leading to Kashmir's frontier district of Kargil.
It exploded as three employees of the local agriculture department passed by, killing one person on the spot and injuring two others.
Both the injured were shifted to Srinagar's main hospital where one later died and another was said to be in a serious condition, the spokesman added.
However, eyewitness accounts contradicted the police, who claimed the blast occurred when personnel of the National Rifles - an elite counter-insurgency unit - patrolling the area asked the three to open the lunchbox.
The explosion sparked tension in the area and senior police and civil officials rushed to the spot to placate the agitated villagers who had come out onto the streets.
In another incident, two Kashmiri fighters were killed in an encounter with security forces near Shopian, 45 kilometers (27 miles) south of Srinagar.
Another fighter, described by security forces as a Pakistani national, was killed in a shootout with the police's Special Operations Group near Nowgam, 10 kilometers (6 miles) north of Srinagar.
Local residents, however, said the man was first arrested and later died in police in custody, a charge denied by the police.
Elsewhere in Jammu, security forces shot dead 11 fighters belonging to the Pakistan-based Islamic Lashkar-e-Toiba group, an Indian army spokesman said.
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