New Delhi: There is “no scope to do anything with a very belligerent” government, Pakistan’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Hina Rabbani Khar has said on whether she sees a “revival” of bilateral trade with India — bolstering the perception of an increasingly frosty relationship between the two countries.
During her interview with Politico on 14 June, Khar said that while Pakistan was open to any revival of the relationship as a “means of restoring ties”, this wasn’t possible due to an administration in New Delhi whose support was “based on dividing India between Hindus and Muslims”.
Khar’s remarks come at a particularly bad period for Pakistan — the country is currently facing a balance of trade crisis and has a high external debt. According to media reports, Pakistan’s annual inflation for the month of May hit 37.97 percent, setting a national record for the second month in a row.
Meanwhile, according to the government’s response in Parliament in February 2022, trade between India and Pakistan stood at $1.35 billion between April and December 2022, and $516 million in 2021-22 — down from $2.4 billion in 2017-18.
It also comes at a time when the frosty relationship between the two countries has given rise to an increase in diplomatic rhetoric.
While speaking to United Nations Security Council in December 2022, for instance, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari called Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi the “butcher of Gujarat” and likened the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to Adolf Hitler’s Schutzstaffel (SS), a paramilitary organisation that enforced the racial policy of the Nazi government during World War II.
This was in response to External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar calling Pakistan out on terrorism, commenting: “The ministers of Pakistan can tell you how long Pakistan intends to practice terrorism.”
Yet another instance came in May this year at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Foreign Ministers’ Council meeting hosted in Goa, when Jaishankar called Bilawal “promoter, justifier…and spokesperson of a terrorism industry which is the mainstay of Pakistan”.
“Victims of terrorism don’t sit together with perpetrators of terrorism to talk about terrorism,” Jaishankar said, in response to Pakistan’s foreign minister, who had asked countries to not “get caught up in weaponising terrorism” or trying to earn diplomatic points for it.
Khar’s comments also come around the time when India wants the Indus Waters Treaty — the cross-border water sharing agreement brokered by the World Bank between India and Pakistan in 1960 — renegotiated.
As ThePrint reported earlier, the Indian government has sent a note verbale to Pakistan proposing a meeting between the water secretaries of the two countries to discuss the issue.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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