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'Pak should stop cross-border terrorism'

Ramesh Menon in New Delhi

Numerous recommendations were made on Tuesday evening by a bilateral conference in New Delhi of social scientists from India and Pakistan.

These recommendations will now be forwarded to the Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and the Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf for their consideration before the summit starts.

The India-Pakistan bilateral conference on 'Development Perspectives in the New Millennium: Forging India-Pakistan Patnership', was organised by the Indian Council for Social Science Research.

It had academicians, social scientists, defence analysts, businessmen and researchers from India and Pakistan.

Over 80 delegates, divided into ten groups, deliberated Monday and Tuesday and came up with some recommendations. The main ones were:

Encourage people-to-people exchanges.
Pakistan should take definite steps to discourage cross-border terrorism.
India should improve human rights situation in Kashmir.
Review the Siachen glacier agreement.
Have a sustained military-to-military interaction.
Resolution of the Kashmir problem.
Work out a multilateral framework for free trade.
Permit a free flow of information.
Promote research and institute exchange programmes.
Ensure that technological cooperation takes place.
Ease all visa restrictions.
Keep politics out of sports.

Speaking to rediff.com, Siddhartha, member of the National Executive of the Bharatiya Janata Party said that the conference had helped in understanding the present psyche of the people in Pakistan as delegates spelt it out. It could be now put up for the consideration of both the leaders before the summit, he said.

Tariq Rangoonwala, chairperson of the Pakistan chapter of the International Chamber of Commerce jocularly remarked that usually governments get conferences of strategic thinkers like this to endorse everything and then go about doing what they want to do. He hoped that these suggestions would be weighed seriously and new doors opened.

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