If the attack on the district collector’s office in Srinagar in January and the attack on the Jammu and Kashmir tourist office on the eve of the inauguration of the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service came as a harsh reminder of Kashmir’s violent history, the overall mood in the valley, for a couple of reasons, suggested otherwise. In recent months, the people of Kashmir have sent a message: Freedom can wait, but development cannot. Two developments symbolise the transformation of popular mood.
India-Pakistan interaction, in recent days, is fast losing its familiar flavour of distrust and bitterness. This is not to deny, however, that one can still identify the inertial sense of rancour, the propensity to misunderstand and misinterpret each other within the dialogic track that has completed one year.
The proposal to reconvene the 13th SAARC Summit soon has rekindled the hopes of South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) coming into force on schedule on 01 Jan 2006. It is a sad commentary on the regional economic cooperation that although the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) has been in existence for about 20 years, the intra regional trade is still languishing below five percent of the global trade of the member states. It is widely believed that all the seven states of the region will benefit immensely in the long run from the economic benefits of SAFTA.
The intense media interest and the more modest outcome of what ultimately transpired after the just concluded visit of the Pakistani PM Mr. Shaukat Aziz to New Delhi is in many ways indicative of the tone and texture of Indo-Pak relations at the present moment. While the two nations have had a relationship of varying degrees of hostility and bitterness since October 1947, the agreement reached in January 2004 over the Composite Dialogue Process (CDP) is the framework in which bi-lateral ties are now being pursued.
The Changing Definition of Kashmir
If the attack on the district collector’s office in Srinagar in January and the attack on the Jammu and Kashmir tourist office on the eve of the inauguration of the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service came as a harsh reminder of Kashmir’s violent history, the overall mood in the valley, for a couple of reasons, suggested otherwise. In recent months, the people of Kashmir have sent a message: Freedom can wait, but development cannot. Two developments symbolise the transformation of popular mood.