'Indian, Pakistani youth more keen on economic cooperation'

NEW YORK: With the next generation of politicians and public more concerned with economic development than strident nationalism, India and Pakistan could collaborate on achieving their internal development goals, said Indian MP Sachin Pilot.

Speaking at a round table on South Asia organised by an American university, Pilot said the younger generation - more than half of Indians and Pakistanis are under the age of 25 - is beginning to see economic connections between the two countries as more valuable than the nationalist ideals of the Indian bureaucracy and the Pakistani army.

Brown University in Rhode Island organised the inaugural conference to bring together youths from India and Pakistan, taking a cue from the 1930-32 Round Table conference in London attended by Hindu and Muslim representatives from British India for their mutual goal of independence.

Both Pilot and the Pakistani representative Imran Qidwai, co-founder of the Organisation of Pakistani Entrepreneurs, spoke of possibilities for collaboration between the two countries, emphasising their common economic goals and potential for trade relations.

Both speakers also pointed out the degree of amity between Indians and Pakistanis living abroad, where many become members of joint organisations. These groups, especially young people, they said, can exercise pressure on the two nations by communicating their sense of joint culture back home.

Pilot observed that the armed control of the border has simply criminalised trade between the two to allow black market exchanges, and said the next generation is pressing for an opening of the border to allow for more regional exchange.

Referring to Pakistan's current security crisis, he insisted that "no one has more to lose than India" from Pakistan's destabilisation, but India would not intervene in her neighbour's political makeup to institute any particular kind of regime.

Qidwai suggested education, environment, energy, healthcare and technology as the fields where the two countries might share resources and goods.

Key areas of development for the broader economy, he said, might come from Pakistan's strategic location between the Persian Gulf and the oil rich nations of Central Asia, making the country a possible conduit for the transport of oil to South Asia.

Talking of the relatively weak trade in the region, Qidwai said other SAARC nations would take their cue from India and Pakistan.

The conference was aimed to lay the groundwork for a larger symposium in the future, bringing together Indian and Pakistani students.

Brown University's ongoing Strait Talk Symposium for China and Taiwan has shown that seemingly intractable conflicts can be transformed by individual and personal connections between the populations - particularly the young - of rival nations when political diplomacy stagnates.