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Lahore: Pakistan’s commerce minister Khurram Dastagir Khan on Friday sought to link progress on India-Pakistan trade with Pakistan’s larger dialogue with India on all disputes, including Kashmir, even as he called for a resumption of official-levels talks that have been suspended since last year.
Khan said talks were on to resolve issues like India’s demand for non-discriminatory market access (NDMA) or most-favoured nation (MFN) status under the provisions of the World Trade Organization which provides for unfettered trade between countries.
But, speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the India Show 2014 put up in Lahore by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci) and India’s commerce ministry, he refused to set a deadline for the conclusion of these talks.
“We are making very good progress and we are hoping to be able to conclude our discussions,” Khan said when asked about the possibility of offering non-discriminatory market access (NDMA) to India.
“No time frames can be put because, ultimately, that’s what I mentioned to the honourable prime minister (Manmohan Singh), when you are talking about trade you can go to a certain extent but then trade talks hit a wall where other ministries get involved, that’s the issue,” Khan said referring to his recent visit to New Delhi for a South Asian business event.
During that visit, India and Pakistan had agreed on NDMA besides opening up the Wagah-Attari land route for trade round the clock.
At present, only 137 items can be traded through the Attari-Wagah border. Pakistan has already missed the deadline to eliminate the negative list of tradeable items. Dismantling the list would automatically lead to granting India NDMA. Asked to elaborate, Khan said India and Pakistan needed to take all sides along. “The very fact that the composite dialogue is suspended as of today...so instead of the two foreign ministries saying will you be my Valentine, talks are suspended.”
“What we are really hoping is that the trade dialogue can go forward in the atmosphere in which our larger dialogue is resumed and we are able to discuss these issues,” the Pakistani minister said though he immediately added that Pakistan was not adding any preconditions to the trade talks.
India and Pakistan resumed peace talks in February 2011 after a break caused by the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks that India blames on the Pakistan-based militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba. Trade has been the main driver of the resumed round of talks, with India taking the in-principle decision to allow Pakistani companies to invest in India and Pakistan increasing the number of items that can be traded with India. Both sides also opened a second check-post through which trade can take place at the Wagah-Attari border in Punjab.
The two countries were also looking at their banks opening branches in the other country to facilitate trade. Bilateral trade which was $250 million in 2003 rose to $2.6 billion in 2013. Senior Indian commerce ministry official Arvind Mehta on Friday confirmed that Pakistan’s exports to India had doubled in the past three years from $ 250 million to $ 530 million. It was a measure of India’s commitment to improving trade ties with Pakistan that India was hosting the second India Show in Pakistan after a gap of two years, he said.
India-Pakistan ties hit a further roadblock last year when two Indian soldiers were beheaded in January along the de facto line of control (LoC) border in Kashmir.
The killing of five more Indian soldiers in an ambush in August and firing along the LoC in violation of a November 2003 pact also clouded relations, stalling bilateral peace talks.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif in New York in September but the two sides could not find common ground on the violation of the 2003 ceasefire pact. With India gearing itself for national polls, “forward movement in India-Pakistan talks is difficult to expect”, a person close to the development said on Friday.
Describing himself as a person born after the 1971 India-Pakistan war, Khan said many people of his generation were asking if India and Pakistan would continue to remain mired in their differences—over Kashmir and Pakistan’s grievance over the role India played in helping win independence for Bangladesh.
During campaigning for the 2013 May elections in Pakistan that brought the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) to power, Khan noted that there were no anti-India sentiment expressed by any major political grouping in Pakistan.
He described visa restrictions on business travellers as the biggest non-tariff barrier.
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