On the road with Commerce and Industries Minister Anand Sharma and his key aide, Commerce Secretary Rahul Khullar, as they crossed the Wagah border into Pakistan less than ten days ago, were a motley group of hard-boiled journalists and eight top chefs from the Taj group of hotels.
Only a couple of days earlier, several businessmen had travelled to Lahore – a city at the heart of the Indian subcontinent, with Delhi coming a close second – to participate in the first-ever “Made in India” show, organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry. The 150-strong group then travelled to Karachi, and then to Islamabad, where Sharma and his comrades met up with Pakistan Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani.
Perhaps – perhaps not – Sharma and his group noticed the large, framed print of Jimmy Contractor’s famous painting of the journey that millions of Indians and Pakistanis took nearly 65 years ago, placed on the side of the arch that welcomes you to Pakistan.
This is where it all began – or ended – in the weeks and months before and after August 15, 1947. Conservative accounts place the number of men, women and children who travelled across Wagah at about 10 million. Nobody really knows how many were killed in the fires that burned for weeks and months before and after.
Today, this no man’s land, which stretches between the border of India and Pakistan, is framed by rolls of concertina wire and interspersed with porters in green and blue. Perhaps, on one side, there’s a truck waiting to disgorge its booty of onions or potatoes. Except, it can’t cross into the other country, because each heavy-handed bureaucracy has deemed it a possible security risk.
The meetings in Lahore and Karachi were a resounding success, with members from the Rawalpindi chamber of commerce mingling with their counterparts. Rawalpindi is also the headquarters of the all-powerful Pakistan army, so it follows that the army was on board on at least this special Indian venture.
Perhaps it was too much to expect for Gilani to push the Cabinet note delineating the process for giving India Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status. Notably, Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik opposed it, as did Textiles Minister Mushtaq Ali Cheema. It seems Malik wants to visit India, but Delhi opposes it because it first wants action on the accused in the Mumbai 2008 carnage.
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In a tit-for-tat measure, Malik scotched the visit of Indian home secretary to Pakistan that was supposed to have taken place in December. At that meeting, both sides were supposed to announce the opening of the visa regime for Indian and Pakistani businessmen. The details had all been worked out, but Malik did not budge.
The India-Pakistan relationship has always had to contend with bad blood. Now it also has to deal with colossal ego.
As for Cheema, he took the view that Indian goods would swamp Pakistan if MFN was granted. The Cabinet note did not pass.
Over the last year or so, Sharma and Khullar, encouraged by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, had staked their reputation by looking for ways to engage with Pakistan. With the unslaked anger around the Mumbai attacks looming large, you needed a brave man to push against the odds. On the other side, Pakistan’s Commerce Secretary Zafar Mehmood turned out to be an unusual ally.
The Khullar-Mehmood diaries will probably provide a wealth of information and insight into the long, winding road that is still taking Pakistan from relinquishing its “positive list” – only those items that feature here can be traded – to a “negative list”, that is, everything can be traded except these items.
Mehmood had promised, during his trip to Delhi in 2011, that Pakistan would move to this “negative list” in February, followed by MFN status for India, by the end of the year.
Not surprisingly, the Indian delegation was deeply unhappy when the Pakistan Cabinet note did not pass. Pakistan Commerce Minister Makhdoom Amin Fahim, totally on board the expanding relationship with India, understood the anger.
Makhdoom pointed out to Rehman Malik and Cheema that the Pakistan business community had welcomed the move several times over. He added that India had upturned several layers of bureaucratic rigidity by acceding to Pakistan’s request that it should not come in the way of a European Union offer to reduce tariffs on textiles at the World Trade Organisation. With what face could he now face his Indian guests?
Over the next 24 hours, from the night of February 14 to the night of February 15, Indian and Pakistani elected representatives and officials had the frankest of conversations. The whole process could come to a standstill, the Pakistanis heard, if they backtracked. Forget about freeing the visa regime, forget about ramping up trade at Wagah, forget about creating a new trade checkpost at Munabao-Khokhrapar in Rajasthan.
Elsewhere, the influential Pakistani business community was making its point clear : the economy was in dire straits and it made eminent sense to trade with India, especially when the terms were soft, rather than take aid with stringent conditionalities from Western nations. They encouraged their government to bite the bullet.
Gilani announced that night that Pakistan would soon move from its “positive” to a “negative” list with India.
On such tiny gains, relationships are built. On such painstaking movement, friendships are called in. As for national interest, it is usually up to a handful of people to define it, both for their country and their highly insecure neighbours. In this particular case of the commerce ministry’s top honchos, the ayes certainly have it.
The writer is a freelance journalist and a consultant with Ficci