by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
By Saurabh Katkurwar,
New Delhi : The Indian government’s decision to hike duty to 200 per cent on all imports from Pakistan in the aftermath of the Pulwama terror attack is set to affect the already dwindling agri trade between the countries further.
India’s export to Pakistan has declined by more than half in the past four years due to various issues that include restrictions on exports via road, administrative blockades by Pakistani authorities.
And the latest casualty of the decision is likely to be onions, which the Indian authorities were planning to sell overseas in the wake of bumper domestic production this year.
Now, the plan has been shelved following the withdrawal of the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status to Pakistan, according to the sources in the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA).
India exported 6.43 lakh tonnes of agriculture commodities worth Rs 1,880 crore to Pakistan in 2014-15 while it came down to 1.16 lakh tonnes worth Rs 784 crore in 2017-18.
“In addition to the lower demand, Pakistani authorities did not issue import permits for the Indian commodities,” said an official, close to the development.
“There will be a reaction from Pakistan over the decision of hiking import duty. We do not expect that onion would be permitted to be sold across the border now.”
Pakistan stood at the 16th position in 2014-15 in terms of the volume of agriculture products from India exported to any country. Its position lowered to 22nd in 2017-18 but it gained 16th position in 2018-19 (April- December).
Indian Oilseeds and Produce Export Promotion Council (IOPEPC) office-bearer Sanjiv Sawla said the overall volume may go down by ten times now.
“Bigger challenge will be for India since we are not importing from Pakistan as much as we are selling to them. Certainly, Pakistan will respond. It may not increase import duty but harass us through permit and quarantine issues,” he said.
In 2016, as many as 130 containers carrying 2,500 tonnes of peanuts exported from India were stuck at the Karachi port for over eight months.
The same year, exports of cotton and soya had dropped after Pakistan put temporary bans citing phytosanitary conditions, though the traders claimed border tension being the major reason.
Notably, India’s share in the total amount of groundnut imported by Pakistan in 2017 was over 75 per cent, 55 per cent in guargum.
Pulses, cereals, fresh and processed vegetables, buffalo meat, poultry products, jaggery & confectionery are among the major agro-products being exported in bulk quantity.
In 2018-19, over 61,949 tonnes of agri commodities worth Rs 455 crore have been exported to Pakistan during April- December for year 2018-19.
The overall situation of the exim trade is not encouraging as the exports of all commodities to Pakistan worth Rs 12,397 crore comes to just 0.63 per cent of total exports by India in 2017-18, as per data of the Commerce Ministry.
India imported commodities worth Rs 3,096 crore from Pakistan in the same year, which is 0.11 per cent of the total imports.
However, traders and exporters said there is great potential in the agri trade between the two neighbours owing to common interests in culture, cuisine, traditions.
(Saurabh Katkurwar can be contacted at saurabh.k@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Media, News
By Jaideep Sarin,
Attari (Punjab) : The important role played by the vernacular media in the country’s freedom struggle, which contributed to the end of the British rule in August 1947, has found a new platform right near the international border between India and Pakistan.
A new gallery of rare images of old vernacular newspapers of pre-Partition Punjab has recently been unveiled at the Museum of Peace at ‘Sarhad’ (border) complex, around two km from the Attari-Wagah border.
Titled ‘Pre-Partition Punjab – Vernacular Press’, the gallery displays issues of some of the oldest Urdu dailies of those times, including ‘Paisa Akhbar’, ‘Zamindar’, ‘Daily Inquilab’ and ‘The Akali (Amritsar)’.
The issues of these old vernacular newspapers, some of them from the 19th and early 20th century, have been sourced from archival sources in Lahore by a retired bureaucrat, D.S. Jaspal.
“The role of the vernacular press in pre-Partition Punjab and its critical influence on events leading to 1947 is a very neglected area of study,” Jaspal told IANS.
“By the first quarter of the 20th century, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs had their own media which used nationalism as a platform to project and promote their identity interests,” Jaspal, who served as Secretary in Punjab’s Information Department for several years, pointed out.
Started in 1885 at one paisa per copy, ‘Paisa Akhbar’ blazed a new trail in journalism and by 1898 commanded the highest circulation of 5,000 copies.
‘Zamindar’, which started in Lahore in 1903 with a mission to project issues of farmers and landowners, eventually turned stridently nationalistic, projecting the Muslim point of view, which boosted its circulation to over 30,000 copies.
“Closer to 1947, the inflammatory and polarised content was pushing up circulation figures and it is not clear whether content was driving circulation or circulation driving content,” Jaspal pointed out.
The first issue of ‘The Akali’ was published in Punjabi from Lahore on May 21, 1920. In October 1922, it merged with the “Pradesi Khalsa”, a daily run in Amritsar by Master Tara Singh, an extremely popular leader of the Shiromani Akali Dal who was a founding member of the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committe, and shifted to the Sikh holy city, where it was published in Urdu-Persian script. Master Tara Singh, was its Editor.
The language of the earliest vernacular papers like “Paisa Akhbar” and “Zamindar” had a high degree of Persian content, which was gradually discarded in favor of Urdu to increase circulation by catering to a wider readership.
The new gallery is displayed at the ‘Museum of Peace’, conceived, designed and curated by Jaspal as a celebration of the common composite culture of pre-partition Punjab in general and Amritsar-Lahore in particular.
Located within the Sarhad restaurant complex, an Amritsari-Lahori cuisine specialty restaurant, near the Attari-Wagah border, 30 km from Amritsar, the museum is India’s first open-air, walk-through, story-telling museum. It has no entry fee.
It has 48 large panels mounted on sturdy 7-feet-high pedestals that depict pre-partition Punjab in three sections, beginning with the rule of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Different panels display Ranjit Singh’s military conquests – the capture of Peshawar Fort, Jamrud Fort and the Zamama Gun.
The British colonial period traces the organic links between the twin cities of Amritsar and Lahore through growth of the railways, education, trade and Lahore’s film industry. One panel shows a 100-year-old Lahore-Pathankot railway ticket costing Rs 3, considered quite a princely sum in those days.
The museum is dedicated to late Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. In February 1999, Vajpayee, in his quest for lasting peace in the sub-continent, had crossed the Attari-Wagah border in a luxury bus to Lahore to take forward the sub-continental peace process that however, got derailed when Pakistani intruders occupied the icy heights of Jammu and Kashmir a few months later. The Indian Army lost over 700 personnel in clearing the heights.
Jaspal proposes academic collaboration between universities on both sides of the border to study the growth and impact of the vernacular press in pre-partition Punjab.
“Otherwise, we may have many mini-1947s (the partition of the sub-continent) silently incubating,” he maintained.
(Jaideep Sarin can be contacted at jaideep.s@ians.in )
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Interviews
Pakistani writer Fatima Bhutto
By Saket Suman,
New Delhi : Whatever the state of politics between India and Pakistan may be, the citizens of the neighbouring countries, separated at birth, are naturally drawn to each other and you cannot stop that, says Fatima Bhutto, niece of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and granddaughter of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.
She said there has always been “a great warmth” between the people of the two countries, and that she has personally been a witness to it.
“Whether it’s Pakistani serials or Indian films, art or books, as a people we are naturally drawn to each other and open and curious to learn more… Art has always broken barriers — it’s always been a powerful way for people to connect and communicate with each other and I think the ease of the internet has helped us overcome physical obstacles,” the 36-year-old writer, who has been a critic of Benazir Bhutto and her husband Asif Ali Zardari, whom she accused of being involved in her father’s murder, told IANS in an email interview from Karachi.
She recalled that, in the year gone by, she read books by several Indian authors online and even discovered authors she had not read before such as Gurmehar Kaur, Supriya Nair and Raghu Karnad.
“… no amount of downfall anywhere can stop me from seeking out new and interesting voices.”
However, the cultural exchanges between India and Pakistan have hit rock bottom in the past two years, with only books being the exception. On this being pointed out, and asked of her prescription for enriching people-to-people ties between the two countries, Bhutto urged people to engage with each other’s creative and popular cultures.
“What we must do is keep insisting that we want to read each other, want to speak to each other and reject attempts to interrupt that,” she said.
Interestingly, her novel “The Runaways” — about radicalism and the confusions of millennial culture and how difficult it is to survive in a world on fire — which released towards the end of 2018, was welcomed with rave reviews in India.
She said when she began writing it, she was thinking primarily about her two main male characters — Monty and Sunny — who come from very different worlds but are thrown together in the wilds of Iraq. The narrative of the novel also makes it apparent that youngsters are drawn to radicalism as a result of societal and political pressures.
“The narrative we are fed today is that radicalism is born out of religion, I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think radicalism comes from a hundred different humiliations and wounds — not just one source. To boot, we live in a time where young people are subjected to an overwhelming culture of the self: Everyone wants to be famous, to go viral, to be seen, to be significant,” she said.
Asked if there there was a political ideology that goes into her writings, Bhutto said she doesn’t set out to write about politics, it’s not her intention when she sits down at her desk, but it’s what she is drawn to.
“My way of seeing the world is shaped by a fundamental belief that politics is ingrained in everything. It codes the films we watch, the places we travel to, how we live, how we treat others, how we dress — everything. With ‘The Runaways’ I wanted to write about what has to happen to a person in order to radicalise him — what does it mean to be at war with your society, your family, your friends, your world? But it’s also a novel about loneliness, about social media, about not feeling and wanting to be powerful. I’m not an ideologue, I’m interested in people — I don’t want to judge anyone but to observe them and hopefully understand them.”
The title of her novel may leave some readers wondering if the author is herself a Runaway too, particularly in view of the upheavals that her family has been witness to in the political trajectory of Pakistan.
Bhutto recalled she was born in exile and spent a good part of her life searching for the idea of home.
“I used to say that I always felt like a rootless person but that’s not quite correct, I think it’s the opposite — I have roots everywhere. Not nowhere. I have roots in Afghanistan because of blood and birth, in Syria because it was my first home, the first place I truly loved, in Iran because my Dadi was from Isfahan and so much of the language, the food, the humour of the country remind me of her… and it goes on. I’m at home everywhere in the world and rather than feeling displaced, I feel connected. Home is the people you love, it’s not a geography,” she said.
“The Runaways” is published by Penguin Random House and is available in both bookstores and online.
(Saket Suman can be contacted at saket.s@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Frank F Islam,
Will cricket legend Imran Khan’s ascension to power in Pakistan ease tensions between his homeland and India? Mr Khan, who took the oath to become Pakistan’s 22nd Prime Minister (PM) last week is immensely popular in cricket-crazy India. The rivalry between Pakistan and India is so strong, however, that even he may find it hard to repair the broken ties between the two nations, which have fought three wars over the past 70 years.
Fortunately, at this early point in time, the initial indications from both sides have been positive. Khan expressed a desire for better relations with India in his victory speech. After taking the oath of office, he used Twitter to call for a dialogue with India to resolve conflicts, including Kashmir. He stated “Best way to alleviate poverty and uplift the people of the Subcontinent is to resolve our differences through dialogue and start trading”. Indian PM Narendra Modi expressed similar feelings in congratulating Mr Khan on his new position, calling for “meaningful and constructive engagement” with Pakistan.
Because of this temporary détente, Imran has the opportunity to take the lead in resetting Pakistan’s relations with India. There are two factors that he can exploit in this regard. First, Imran enjoys substantial goodwill among Indian opinion makers owing to his long and distinctive association with the game of cricket. The former leader of the Indian Opposition Congress party, Sonia Gandhi has called him “a brother”. Former Indian cricketer and current politician Navjot Singh Sidhu travelled from India to attend Khan’s inauguration as PM.
Second, it is widely believed that Imran Khan has the backing of Pakistan’s powerful military establishment, which is a key stakeholder when it comes to improving India-Pakistan ties. His predecessor, Nawaz Sharif did not have the support of the military. There was a trust deficit and as a result there was no major initiative toward India. In contrast, with the confidence and support of the military, Mr Khan has the potential to launch asuccessful peace initiative with India.
PM Modi must be PM Khan’s partner if such an initiative is to come to fruition. Because of his recent statements and past actions, it appears that Modi is sincerely interested in improving the relationship between India and Pakistan.
There are two fundamental issues that have been at the centre of the ongoing conflict between Pakistan and India. These are Kashmir and terrorism
Consider that Modi invited his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif to attend his swearing in ceremony as PM and made a surprise trip to Lahore to attend the wedding of MrSharif’s granddaughter. Given Mr Sharif’s problematic relationship with the Pakistan military, these interactions never lead to serious discussions. Now, with Mr Khan at the helm in Islamabad, the equation has changed and the prospects for a successful dialogue have improved considerably.
In spite of this, defining and building a path to peace will not be easy for the two PMs. There are two fundamental issues that have been at the centre of the ongoing conflict between Pakistan and India. These are Kashmir and terrorism. While Pakistan consistently calls for the resolution of the Kashmir issue, India urges Pakistan to do more on curbing “cross-border terrorism”. Resolution of these issues will require substantial public support and the endorsement of the security establishments on both sides of the border. While this may be difficult to achieve, it is not impossible.
In the past, the two countries have come close to resolving the issues dividing them. In early 2007, Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf and Indian PM Manmohan Singh were close to a negotiated peace deal. That deal brokered through back channel diplomacy did not see the light of day, however, as Musharraf got embroiled in domestic political disputes that eventually resulted in his ouster. According to a leaked US embassy cable dated April 21, 2009, PM Singh told a visiting US delegation that India and Pakistan had agreed to a non-territorial solution to Kashmir which involved free trade and movement across the Line of Control.
Similarly, efforts were made in the past to address Indian concerns on cross border infiltrations through a composite dialogue between the two countries. The dialogue resulted in several confidence building measures between the two countries including a ceasefire on the Kashmir border and the start of bus service between Sri Nagar and Muzaffarabad. Unfortunately, this peace process came to a screeching halt due to the Samjhota Express Bombings of 2007 and the Mumbai attacks of 2008.
That was then, and this is now. With Imran Khan and Narenda Modi leading Pakistan and India, there is hope for the restoration of a formal peace process. The desire for peace appears mutual. None the less, the negotiations leading to a comprehensive settlement will no doubt be difficult, complex and time-consuming.
Given this, it would be well to remember the adage, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Heeding this advice, it might make sense to begin rebuilding the relationship between Pakistan and India with small steps that could help set the stage for a full-fledged peace agreement.
Some small steps that could be taken in the near term to strengthen the bonds and build a cooperative and collaborative framework between Pakistan and India include improving people to people contact through a cultural exchange. Restoration of bilateral sports events — especially cricket series — could a go a long way in improving relations. The two countries could strengthen the regional body named South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). This forum has the potential to not only bring Pakistan and India closer together but alsoto address the Afghanistan conundrum. Easing visa regimes to encourage cross border travel and social interaction will also help. Currently it is almost impossible for ordinary citizens of one country to get visas to visit the other. Producing Indian Bollywood movies which have a great following in Pakistan with joint Pakistani-Indian staffing and casting will also help. Starting bilateral trade between the two countries on a limited scope basis focusing on items and areas that are important to the working class in both countries will also bring the two neighbours closer.
Evolving a counter-terrorism mechanism to protect the more than 1.5 billion citizens of this region from becoming victims of terrorists is also very important. Encouraging religious tourism so that Muslims can travel to their sacred places in India and the Sikh community can travel to their sacred places in Pakistan is also necessary.
These small steps and others could start the development of a new relationship between Pakistan and India. They will give peace a chance. They will provide Khan, Modi and their representatives the time and space they needto do the work required to build the enduring partnership that is essential for the future of this region.
