Open The Parasol

Nine days after Pakistani Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Jamali announced a complete unilateral ceasefire along the LoC, his Indian counterpart, Atal Behari Vajpayee, wrote a letter confirming his participation in the SAARC summit. But bureaucrats in New Delhi have been preparing the ground for a bilateral engagement in Islamabad that promises to swamp the 12th SAARC summit, between January 4 and 6. It's now a certainty the SAARC summit could well provide the first clear roadmap to normalisation of Indo-Pak relations, including the launching of a dialogue process.

Officials, however, say the dialogue process would still be subject to the caveat of Pakistan providing satisfaction on the question of terrorism. What is encouraging is that Indian officials are happy at the ceasefire holding. There hasn't been any interdiction of infiltrators ever since the LoC fell silent.

Last week, officials were caught in a flurry of inter-ministerial meetings to take stock of the protocols and the processes required to augment the cbms the two countries have embarked on. These largely pertain to enhancing people-to-people contact through measures such as the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad road and Khokrapar-Munabao rail links, and the Mumbai-Karachi ferry service. The inter-ministerial deliberations assessed the current state of infrastructure, the agency that would run the service and the customs and immigrations procedures. "Each one has its own set of problems," says an official involved in the meetings.

It would be relatively easy, officials say, to restart the Samjhauta Express. "We want that a decision is taken by the end of this year," Jamali had announced on November 25. Ditto the rail route from Khokrapar, Sindh, to Munabao in Rajasthan, in disuse since the '65 war.

The Srinagar-Muzaffarabad road link is more challenging. For one, the segment of the old road near the LoC (beyond Uri) doesn't exist. The two countries have to also work out the security along the prospective route, as also the terminal points. Worse, some of the area is mined. Although Jamali did not speak of the need to travel on UN documents as his foreign secretary Riaz Khokhar had earlier decreed, there is as yet no clue whether Pakistan will give up that claim. At the moment, people from PoK travel on Pakistani passports to Kashmir and the impulse would be to not rock the existing arrangement. Sources say, for instance, that 31 people from PoK travelled to Kashmir in 2001 on Pakistani passports. It is likely that New Delhi will encourage a Wagah-like arrangement after inserting the standard clause that this would be without prejudice to the stated positions of both countries.

These measures, officials say, are still in the realm of conjectures. They say the initial attempt to probe Pakistani intent has been disappointing. This was over the issue of running additional buses between Delhi and Lahore, as Jamali had proposed. When the DTC chairman wrote to the deputy manager of PTDC suggesting India could run an extra bus on December 2 and December 9, and Pakistan could do so on December 5 and 12, "to clear backlog", Pakistan rejected the proposal.

Teething problems? Too early to be ruled out but officials say they will not force the pace on the bilateral front. Where they want to see things move briskly is the SAARC economic agenda. On Wednesday night, for example, after two days of prolonged negotiations, New Delhi and Islamabad agreed on a list of products that can be made accessible to other SAARC countries, especially by the smaller trade partners (Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Maldives).

Economic cooperation within SAARC was introduced into the organisation's agenda in the early '90s and the progress on this front has been less than satisfactory.Although there's talk of a South Asian Economic Union, a senior official says "dividends of regional cooperation, as it exists now, has not been reflected at the grassroots". Nobody expects these dividends to percolate down immediately after the summit. But officials expect to see the South Asian Free Trade Agreement up and running. Energy cooperation is another aspect that has not been sufficiently explored in the region and there could be significant movement on this count as well in Islamabad.