|
Colombo: A leading Pakistani politician has said here that the Islamic nation no longer considers India its enemy number one.
Mushahid Hussain Sayed, the chairman of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, said the reduction in tensions between the two nations has contributed to a "relaxed atmosphere" in the South Asian region.
He told the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies here on Thursday that the relations between his country and India were improving since India had shown sensitivity with regard to Pakistan's political difficulties in 2007 and was changing its attitude over Kashmir.
He said India had accepted Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's thesis that the Kashmir issue had to be solved trilaterally, with the Kashmiri people on both sides of the border also participating in the process of solving the problem.
Sayed pointed out that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was talking to the pro-independence Kashmiri group, the All Party Hurriyat Conference, and Pakistan was talking to the pro-Indian Kashmiri leader Omar Abdullah.
There is going to be a "track two" conference in Colombo involving Kashmiri groups from the Indian and the Pakistani sides.
The Pakistani leader noted that all this had created a "relaxed atmosphere" in the south Asian region.
Sayed saw no possibility of an India-Pakistan war. "War is no longer an option because of the balance of power that exists between the two countries since both countries went nuclear in 1998," he said.
Asked if the Pakistan army would seize power after a while, as it had done so many times in the past, he said: "The ball is in the court of the politicians." He pointed out that often in the past, politicians had roped in the military in their fights.
Although his party was aligned with Musharraf, he said that his "personal view" was that the provision in the Pakistan constitution that gave extraordinary powers of intervention to the president should be reviewed.
"It has been used four times since it came into being in 1998. It has been a source of instability," Sayed said. He urged all South Asian countries to stop squabbling with one another and instead build economic bridges, in tune with the emerging trends in international politics.
Sayed said the south, central and southeast Asian regions had already begun coming together through trade, investment and energy sharing schemes.
Schemes to link central, south and southeast Asia with oil pipelines were an "extremely important" development in the region, bringing diverse countries together, he said.
"A new entity, which could be dubbed Pipelineistan, is emerging," he said.
In this context, he welcomed the expansion of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc), which now has an eighth member, Afghanistan, and has China, Japan, EU, South Korea and the US as observers.
|
