The dialogue’s future – Editorial

мебелиFrom Dawn’s editor – A.G. Noorani Saturday, 08 May, 2010
The peace process which the prime ministers of India and Pakistan, Dr Manmohan Singh and Mr Yousuf Raza Gilani, renewed at Thimpu on April 29, has enormous potential provided that the parties realistically reckon with the hurdles and proceed unitedly with understanding and determination.
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Much depends on how they proceed between now and next September when the prime ministers are expected to meet in New York. India’s Home Minister P. Chidambaram is due to visit Islamabad next month, while meetings between the foreign ministers and foreign secretaries are mandated by the prime ministers themselves. They wisely discarded the traditional joint statement in traditional turgid prose. A careful reading of the statements by Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi in Islamabad on April 30 and India’s Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao in Thimpu on April 29, reveals an encouraging accord on the aims of the peace process and on the tacit assumptions underlying it.

First, as Mr Qureshi said, “there has been a trust deficit and we have to bridge it”, adding significantly “it can be done through confidence-building measures. It will not happen in a day. It is a process”. Presumably the foreign ministers and the foreign secretaries will devise the confidence-building measures. Ms Rao said “dialogue is the only way … [to] restore trust and confidence”. She revealed that the prime ministers “focused on the renewal of dialogue and to understand the factors that have resulted in the current state of affairs”. However, “the searchlight is on the future and not on the past”. She was accurately reflecting the policy towards Pakistan which Dr Manmohan Singh has resolutely pursued ever since he became prime minister in May 2004.

The distrust has two dimensions; recent and latent. Causes of the first are easy to identify (26/11). There is reason to believe that there is greater understanding now of the need to tackle them through judicial and investigative processes. Time and diplomacy have peeled away most layers of the latent distrust which had piled up since partition; but some survived. They are the ones to be tackled now.

There was on Pakistan’s part a legitimate impression that India was avoiding negotiations on Kashmir and stalling on the ones on other issues. I.K. Gujral’s wreckage of the charter of the composite dialogue in the joint statement in Islamabad on June 23, 1997 strengthened the impression. Militancy in Kashmir was by no means the only factor which led India to believe that Pakistan was not in earnest regarding conciliation. Both sides continued to fight on battlefields of old, unmindful of a promising change in the situation.If to many Pakistanis a ‘composite dialogue’ was a litmus test of India’s sincerity in putting 26/11 behind us, to many Indians, fed on the media’s blasts every day, its resumption meant surrender. In truth the charter had long run its course. Foreign secretaries can only do the ground work; they surely cannot resolve Kashmir, ‘peace and security’, Siachen, Wullar barrage, Sir Creek and ‘terrorism and drug-trafficking’ — the topics listed in para 4 of the charter.

More at http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/editorial/the-dialogues-future-850

India struggling with making warfare clothing

IANS Apr 30, 2010
A parliamentary panel has lamented that India, which is capable of launching satellites and manufacturing missiles, tanks and other state-of-the-art defence equipment, lacks adequate capabilities for making specialised clothing for high altitude warfare.

That is the reason why, of the 55 items authorised for soldiers stationed in areas like the Siachen Glacier and Kargil, 19 critical items like down feather jackets, trousers, sleeping bags, multipurpose boots, woollen socks and rucksacks are being imported ‘as no indigenous source was available’, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said in its report.

The committee recommended that domestic production capabilities be strengthened, at least in the public sector, ‘even if the Indian private sector is not forthcoming, ostensibly due to lack of economic viability considerations’.

‘The defence of a nation is a non-negotiable national imperative and under no circumstances can commercial and economic considerations be allowed to compromise the nation’s foremost priority,’ said the committee, headed by Gopinath Munde of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in its report tabled in parliament Thursday.

The committee was also ‘dismayed’ to learn that despite the fact that Army Headquarters has been procuring these items for over two decades, ‘the procedure for formulation of technical specifications, evaluation of offers and selection of vendors have not been streamlined so far’.

Of the 10 contracts concluded during 2002-06 for the purchase of special clothing for Rs.48.88 crore, 59 percent of the items valued at Rs.28.81 crore were rejected either at the receipt inspection stage or by the end users.

‘The whole approach towards procurement of such supplies appears casual so that neither quality not timely availability of critical items could be ensured, thereby compromising safety as well as comfort of the troops deployed in harsh climatic conditions,’ the committee said.

It noted that there were 388 casualties reported due to cold-induced injuries such as frostbite and chilblain.

The committee said the procurement process ‘was fraught by serious delays at every stage, impacting on the timely availability of adequate clothing and equipment each time during deployment of troops to Siachen’.

It took 32 months from the time of raising a demand to the delivery of the items to the troops, mainly because of the ‘severe delay in trial evaluation and finalisation of specifications’ by the Directorate General of Quality Assurance, tendering and the signing of the contract.

Taking into account all the shortcomings in the procurement process, the committee has recommended that the ‘entire procurement procedures be revised, so that from the time of recognising the need for procuring clothing and mountaineering equipment till these are finally delivered to the end users is minimised to the maximum extent consistent with ensuring transparency’.

Fixing of responsibility ‘is seen as a very important step for correcting the acts of omission and commission’, the committee said and asked the defence ministry ‘to fix responsibility on all concerned who were found to be responsible for flaws in procurement procedures, technical evaluations and rejected of ordered clothing and equipment’.