‘Pak needs vision, generosity for better ties with India’

Pakistan needs to show some vision and generosity for relations between itself and India to be normalised, External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid said on Sunday .

‘I believe if the Pakistan government and their policy- makers showed some generosity and vision, then relations between the two countries can be normalised,’ Khurshid said during a session at the annual Jaipur Literature Festival here.

‘For Pakistan’s belief that they have an unfinished agenda of 1947 with us, we want to say that please understand that we have our own idea of India as a country,’ he said adding that, ‘They should not expect us to undermine that idea of ‘India’’.

Responding to a question as to whether it was the Foreign Ministry’s failure that relations between the two countries were dogged by several issues, Khurshid said, ‘Many wise and learned men have also not been able to find an answer to this.

But they (ties) will normalise and it is our faith and they (Pakistan) should believe in it too. ‘If they say that we should cooperate, we would be willing to do so, but if they expect that we will wash out our identity, we would not do it and we should not do it.’ 

Khurshid was here to launch the ‘India Australian Institute Foreign Policy Series’, a six volume publication.

MP Amar Singh and the Australian High Commissioner to India, Patrick Suckling, too, were present on the occasion. Khurshid said that things had changed from the time when Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, had spoken of foreign policy.