New Delhi: Since 1931, the graves of three martyrs—Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru—located in a tiny village called Hussainiwala on India’s border with Pakistan, have been witness to several significant events.
In 1947, the British left after partitioning India into two countries. In 1971, after a major battle between India and Pakistan was fought in this sector, the age-old trade route across undivided Punjab was shut down.
Roadblock? While trade movement across the Wagah-Attari border has considerably gone up, the ceremonial goose-stepping by Pakistani and Indian soldiers twice a day means that truck traffic has to take a back seat.
As India’s external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee prepares to travel to Islamabad on 21 May, for his and India’s first interaction with the newly installed government in Pakistan, there is talk of reopening a second trade route in Punjab, at Hussainiwala on the Indian side and at Gandasinghwala, just across the border in Pakistan.
Officials from the ministries of external affairs and commerce are tight-lipped about reopening the old trade route, but word has leaked out and Zora Singh Mann, the Akali Dal member of Parliament from Ferozepur, in which Hussainiwala village falls, has already petitioned Prime Minister Manmohan Singh about this matter, asking that the route be opened up quickly.
People of this Malwa region, Mann said, want the trade route to be reopened because it will “benefit people from both sides”. In undivided India, the Hussainiwala route was the lifeline for dry fruits, vegetables and fruits that travelled from the hills of Afghanistan to the plains of Punjab. Bilateral trade between India and Pakistan is expected to touch $2.5 billion (about Rs10,000 crore) this year; informal trade, via Dubai, is an additional $1 billion.
The government’s strategy these days, says Jairam Ramesh, minister of state for commerce and power, is to “use economics to promote political relationships. We must bury the ghosts of the past”.
And so, petroleum minister Murli Deora is travelling to Pakistan, ostensibly to hold talks on the feasibility of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (Tapi) pipeline, but also significantly, to take another serious look at the 2,600km-long Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) gas pipeline.
A decision on the gas pipeline has been hanging fire at least since the Kargil conflict between India and Pakistan in May 1999, with New Delhi citing security concerns against investing large sums of money in the project. Some Indian government officials have argued against the pipeline, saying that it will pass through “a dangerous stretch in Balochistan, where the Pakistan government has little control over rebels”.
But Deora’s visit to Pakistan, only days before the day-long visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to New Delhi on 29 April, is fuelling speculation that a possible economic solution to the political deadlock can be found.