R E C E N T EE V E N T RR E P O R T S

PILER organized a lecture on “Taking the Peace Process Forward 10 years after the Nuclear Tests” by Mr. Praful Bidwai , an eminent academician and a notable Indian journalist, on Thursday, 5th June 2008 at the Regent Plaza, Shahrah-e-Faisal , Karachi.

About the speaker:
Praful Bidwai is a New Delhi-based columnist with more than 25 South Asian publications, including The News International. He is also a social science researcher, and an activist in the environmental, human rights, peace and global justice movements.

A former Senior Editor of The Times of India, Bidwai is a founder-member of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace, and an independent nuclear affairs analyst. He was awarded the Sean MacBride Peace Prize of the International Peace Bureau, Geneva and London.

Bidwai is co-author of South Asia on a Short Fuse: Nuclear Politics and the Future of Global Disarmament, Oxford University Press, 2001. Bidwai is a Fellow of the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam.

About the event:
Karamat Ali, the Executive Director at PILER, told the audience that he has known the honored guest for the past 21 years as a friend and an intellectual. After a brief introduction he asked Praful Bidwai to start the lecture.

Praful Bidwai said that potential rivalry between India and Pakistan reached its peaked in 1998. Hence, the nuclear tests were more a tit-for-tat thing and Govts. considered it a feat and a matter of prestige. He urged the people to understand that these biological / chemical weapons are deadly and targeted towards unarmed civilians.

He stated that the deterrence theory had many baseless arguments and clauses. The theory states that nuclear weapons will bring maturity in the military and political leadership of the two countries. Also, it will lend a certain stature and prestige to the owners of the nuclear weapons.
He believed Kargil, per se, was bad enough, but then again there was a 10-month war on Border. Even the attacks on the Indian parliament provoked many threats from both sides.

He then argued that malnutrition remains prevalent in India and as for Pakistan , it was regarded after 1998 and before 9/11 attacks as a liability by the west. So much for international prestige! “Why then North Korea has to bear the status of a leper state.”

Other points included in the lecture were:

• Indians longed to expand the room for international maneuver; there were 13 rounds of negotiations with USA. India spent huge time and energy to talk with US even against domestic opposition. They wanted to get them to accept its status as nuclear power and legitimize it.

• India even affected its diplomatic relationship with Iran by twice opposing Iran’s atomic policy at the international level for completely ridiculous reasons. The room for international policy making has shrunken because of nuclear weapons.

• India developed Agni-3 for the first time - a long missile that can hit as far as main-land China. The time lapse of this new breed of technology is as short as 3 to 10 minutes. Too short an interval to decide or react wisely. He said military minds generally opt for automatic reprisal… both the sides think the worst of each other…. a terrible escalation results.

• Crisis diffusion was even there at the time of Cold War; confrontation at different levels of hierarchy was planned so that mass crisis could be avoided. Nuclear set-up is a very complex system quite prone to accidents. The reality tells accidents happen, systems go wrong; unlike the deterrent theory that says it is 100% accident proof. How unreal! Average rate of road mishaps is 13 times higher and road fatalities remain 20 times higher in India and Pakistan as compared to the rest of the world.

• 20 years ago , a group of peace-activists formulated a treaty that had clauses which ensured that South Asia would get rid of nuclear weapons… it did not, however, stated how to go about the aim. Something like this could be revived with new solutions to today’s problems.

• More and more people are realizing the menace of nuclear weapons. Recently published Henry Kissinger’s statement (in Wall Street Journal) said that nuclear weapons should be abolished. Norwegian Govt. held a conference based on their proposal. People as cynical as Kissinger even speak against it.

• The Peace Agenda has to be comprehensive. The bi-lateral relations, demilitarization and looking at each other through not-so-adversarial ways is the way out of this.

• There is only 5% mutual trade between the two countries. There has to be more economic cooperation. The Pakistani goods and services must be allowed sale without application of duty. Think of livelihoods being positively affected

• There should be easy visa processes. It is only sordid that governments find reasons to avoid allowing consulates to function. Open – visa regime, tourist visas may be !

• There should be more inter-cultural events (Like IPL tournaments). Unlike elite schools, public schools’ students should be involved in such creative forums.

• We have to stop writing history with an inimical nationalist perspective. We should start writing and publishing books on South Asian history, economy. While analyzing some Pakistani history text-books we found the following statement: “The brave Pakistani army drove Alexander the Great out” . Heavens ! Pakistan didn’t even exist at that time. And there is no harm in naming India. There will be some difficulty like “How to write about partition , when neighbor killed another neighbor?” but that will have to be sorted.

• HEC should have more student and faculty exchange programs with India instead of paying thousands of dollars to Western faculty members who go back after a year.

• Answering a qquestion about religious fundametalism ion both sides, he said that Hindutva is happy when there is show of extremism from Pakistani religious fundamentalists as they get a chance to demonize Pakistan and some of Hindutva’s ministers come on TV and say “all Muslims aren’t terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims.”

• Dr. Tipu Sultan said some medicines are very cheap in India and Pakistan can make use of open trade in this area. He said western multinational pharmaceuticals sell the same medicine that is of 5 rupees in India at 100 to 500 times higher rates in Pakistan.
• In the end , he said that achieving all this is only possible by great struggles. We will have to lobby for it.

The lecture was attended by around 100 academicians, civil society members from all over Karachi.

http://dawn.com/2008/06/06/local5.htm

KARACHI: India, Pakistan urged to end nuclear race

By Shamim-ur-Rahman

KARACHI, June 5: A leading Indian journalist and campaigner against nuclear proliferation on Thursday called upon the peace movements in India and Pakistan to force their governments to put the issue of non-proliferation and nuclear risk reduction high on their official agenda, and to open borders for travel and trade through a liberal visa regime.

Praful Bidwai was speaking on the peace process 10 years after tit-for-tat nuclear tests by India from the platform of the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (Piler) in a local hotel.

He was critical of the lack of will on the part of the governments of India and Pakistan in opening their consulates in Mumbai and Karachi and called upon peace movements to have a comprehensive agenda for putting pressure on both governments for opening their borders for trade, travel and cultural exchanges.

He also called for formalizing the peace process and said that in India there was a growing demand for taking special initiatives for promoting bilateral people-to-people contact. He said the recent IPL fixture was an outstanding example of the lead citizens have provided in breaking barriers.

He stressed an exchange of schoolchildren and theatre groups and setting up a people’s commission on South Asian history which, he said, had been distorted. He was of the view that the SAARC framework should also be used especially by the media for pushing the governments.

The main thrust of Praful’s discourse was on the negative fallout of the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan on the region and stressing the need for a more proactive role of the peace movements by coming up with alternatives.

Mr Bidwai, who is an outspoken critic of fast–rising military expenditure on nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan, referred to the situation in India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh, which he claimed had created formidable challenges for the peace movements in the two nuclear capable adversaries.

He noted that while nuclear rivalry between India and Pakistan was growing, the issue had been dropped from their peace talks agenda. He said the induction and deployment of nuclear weapons by the armed forces of the two countries had created finite possibility of their use and inflicting unacceptable harm on mankind. These weapons, he added, cut across generations due to their lethal damage potential and cited the example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

He said it was a great shame that both the governments in India and Pakistan acquired nuclear weapons, despite their destructive nature. He said two years before detonating the last nuclear device, India was actively campaigning for illegalizing the nukes. But after the last tit-for-tat tests New Delhi claimed that nukes would make South Asia more secure and stable and prevent conventional conflict between the two countries, as advocated by the deterrent lobby. He also criticised the notion that the deterrent capability would expand the room for a more independent foreign and security policy and economic and social dividends.

Nullifying these claims, Mr Bidwai claimed that on the contrary South Asia had become more volatile and within a year of the nuclear test both India and Pakistan fought a mid-sized war in Kargil, which was the first conventional conflict after the nuclear tests.

Referring to the India-US nuclear deal, he said that in order to push through the seal, during the past five years New Delhi had tried to convince people that it would behave responsibly despite being a nuclear power. He said that although the deal could be renegotiated, India twice voted against Iran on the nuclear issue, jeopardizing prospects of the IPI and its relationship with Tehran, which had assumed added significance as it provided a bridgehead to Central Asia.

He said that for Pakistan, what was meant to be an asset had become a liability. Room for an independent foreign policy had shrunk and the missile race between the two countries had drastically reduced the reaction time for averting any missile attack and any intervention for peace. He said that missile race had obliterated the strategic depth between the two countries exposing millions of people to annihilation.

He, therefore, called for putting the issue of nuclear risk reduction high on the agenda of the peace movements of the region. He said it was time that both countries reaffirmed their commitment to complete dismantling of nukes.