Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Some progress was made on visas, foreign direct investment, and India potentially re-
ceiving 'most-favoured nation' trading status (which it had given Pakistan 15 years earlier).
Bilateral trade officially totals only some $2.5bn a year, plus perhaps another $3bn in in-
formal links, mainly routed through the Gulf. There is an official target of $6-8bn, but that
is unlikely to be realized because policy decisions are rarely implemented fully or quickly
and there are only two cross-border airline flights a week - a fact that illustrates the tortu-
ous relations.
Terrorism
The perennial question in India is how and why peace initiatives should be continued when
they are regularly disrupted by actions allegedly originating in Pakistan - either terror at-
tacks or clashes on the border - and when Pakistan does not rein in terrorists such as Hafiz
Saeed, who roamed freely in the country despite being held responsible (by the US among
others) for organizing attacks. 'Pakistan is determined to confront us bilaterally, regionally
and internationally. It infiicts wounds on us, through jihadi terrorism, for instance,' says
other country that uses terrorism as an instrument of state policy towards us, or where ji-
hadi groups openly exist and incite hatred towards India.'
Terrorism drove the countries close to full military conflict in December 2001, when
there was an attack on the Indian parliament building in Delhi, significantly (and humili-
atingly in Indian eyes) just five months after Vajpayee had hosted the Agra summit. The
US and UK feared in December 2001 that India would stage a retaliatory attack that could
have sparked a nuclear war, and the UK advised its nationals living in Delhi to be prepared
to evacuate - a move that India condemned as diplomatic pressure to make it back off from
a confrontation. On 26 November 2008, in a much bigger attack, now remembered as 26/
11, terrorists arrived by sea in Mumbai and shot their way into the Taj and Oberoi hotels
and other targets, killing 166 people. This led to increasing pressure in India, escalated by
media coverage, to respond strongly in response to such threats and terrorism.
One method has been spelt out by G. Parthasarathy, a former senior diplomat and high
commissioner to Pakistan (1998-2000), who says that during the Narasimha Rao govern-
ment in the mid1990s, 'acts of terrorism in India resulted in violence in populated centres
like Karachi and Lahore'. As a consequence, 'terrorism in Indian urban centres virtually
so it might have been assumed that terrorist attacks would build up again in India, says
Parthasarathy, but that did not happen. 'Pakistansponsored terrorism in Punjab ended and
was virtually non-existent across India, except in Jammu and Kashmir. This was largely
because of measures by Narasimha Rao to ensure that Pakistan paid a high price on its
