Golden Opportunity To Improve Indo-Pak Ties: Expert

A leading American academic says I K Gujrals taking over as Prime Minister presents a golden opportunity for new confidence-building measures between India and Pakistan.

Stanley Wolpert, professor of Indian History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of the recently published controversial book on Jawaharlal Nehru, said the prospects also looked bright for troop disengagement and possible demilitarisation of the border.

Wolpert was speaking to a gathering of journalists and embassy personnel from Pakistan and India as well as some US state department and defence personnel at the Carnegie Endowment.

The immediate prospects are very bright (for improvement of relations between India and Pakistan), Wolpert said, warning however if the Gujral government fell, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would come to power.

He said it would not be surprising if the BJP came to power in this millenium.

But Gujral, who he said has a party of one, was extraordinarily well versed and experienced, and will preside for at least one year if not two or three.

Most of South Asia, he noted, was experiencing democratic rule and India has seen the rise of the dalits. At the same time, he noted, the recent political crisis in India shows how remarkably fragile this coalition is.

He said it is not exactly a sleigh ride to get the budget authored by former finance minister P Chidambaram passed.

But Gujral, Wolpert emphasised, was a man who has the capability of pulling together many political strands.

Author of biographies on former Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the countrys founder M A Jinnah, Wolpert said Pakistan has had a slower acceptance of the imperatives of democratic rule but that its middle class was becoming more powerful, making it possible for democracy to flourish there.

He indicated that former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto had little chance of getting back the government, adding that hopefully, perhaps, she would opt to remain in London.