Pics by Rons Bantwal
Mumbai, Jul 29: The recent India-Pakistan peace talks between India's foreign minister S M Krishna and his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmood Qureshi may have failed mid-July in Pakistan. Call it grandstanding, one-upmanship, whatever. But that has not dented the faith of common people across the border that they can succeed where their leaders have so diligently failed.
These people -- through various people-to-people contact programmes -- keep pushing governments of both the countries for less visa restrictions, free movement of people and goods across the borders, cutback in the huge defence budgets of the two nations that has helped spawn a military-industrial complex with entrenched vested interests, dismantling of their nuclear establishment and curbing of terror acts on both sides of the border.
One such initiative is the India-Pakistan Peace Caravan, flagged off on Wednesday from Mumbai's August Kranti Maidan by Maharashtra deputy chief minister Chhagan Bhujbal.
The Caravan is scheduled to wind its trail through different parts of Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Delhi, Haryana, and culminate on August 14 Pakistan's Independence Day -- at Attari, the frontier town in Indian side of Punjab where they will welcome their counterparts, who have set on a similar Caravan from Karachi today, on the Pakistan side of Punjab at the Wagah border.
Then, if allowed permission, the Indian delegates will cross into Pakistan to attend a convention in Lahore on August 15, India's Independence Day.
Two days before that, on August 13, Pakistani delegates, if they get visas, will attend noted journalist and former Rajya Sabha MP Kuldip Nayar's convention in Amritsar.
The volunteers of the India-Pakistan Peace Caravan, in a symbolic gesture to show that the two countries are not very different from each other, will mix the soil they are carrying from their respective countries.
But what concrete changes on ground, cynics may ask, can these people-to-people peace-friendship initiatives achieve? Apart from lighting candles, singing friendship songs at night vigils across the Atari-Wagah what else have they achieved?