Mani Shankar Aiyar devoted a full chapter to his Pakistan stint in his autobiography. (File)

New Delhi:

Batting for resumption of dialogue with Pakistan, diplomat-turned-politician Mani Shankar Aiyar says India will not be capable of take its due place on this planet so long as its western neighbour is an “albatross around our necks”.

The Congress leader, who served as India’s consul general in Karachi from December 1978-January 1982, has dedicated a full chapter to his Pakistan stint in his autobiography “Memoirs of a Maverick — The First Fifty Years (1941-1991)” that hit the stands on Monday.

In an interview with Press Trust of India on his new book, published by Juggernaut Books, Mr Aiyar said the high point of his bureaucratic career was undoubtedly his stint as consul general in Pakistan and he has dwelt at very great length on his three years in Karachi in the first volume out now.

India’s “greatest asset” in Pakistan were the people there who did not consider it an enemy country, he said.

“We had been getting back from a dinner sooner or later, throughout the first two-three weeks of the posting, when my spouse Suneet requested me a query that reverberated in my thoughts in my keep in Karachi – ‘This is an enemy nation, proper’?” Mr Aiyar said he asked himself the question through his three years there and for the last 40 years since he came back from Pakistan.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that no matter will be the view of the sections of the military, or sections of polity, so far as the folks of Pakistan are involved, they’re neither an enemy nation nor do they regard India as an enemy nation,” he claimed in his interview to Press Trust of India.

“Every time we wish to show our disapproval of the (Pakistani) authorities, visas are stopped, movies are stopped, TV exchanges are stopped, books are stopped, journey is stopped, so I do not see why we have no idea the right way to leverage the goodwill of the folks of Pakistan as an integral a part of our diplomatic method,” Mr Aiyar added.

For the last nine years all dialogue between India and Pakistan has been frozen, he noted.

“Until Mr (Narendra) Modi grew to become prime minister of India, virtually each prime minister, if he had the time, was making an attempt some form of a dialogue with the Pakistanis however now we’re in a freeze and the victims of this freeze usually are not the military of Pakistan which remains to be swigging its scotch, it’s the folks of Pakistan whose family in massive numbers stay in India and lots of of whom have a want to go to our nation,” he said.

Mr Aiyar said that during his diplomatic stint in Karachi, he issued three lakh visas and did not get a single complaint of misuse.

“So why are we focusing on the Pakistani folks? You can goal the Pakistani institution if you wish to, however so far as the persons are involved, they’re our greatest asset and so far as the institution is anxious, we will goal them however we have to interact with them,” the former diplomat, who quit the Indian Foreign Service in 1989 to join the Congress, said.

He said he was impressed by a book launch event recently where five former Indian high commissioners to Pakistan participated and all insisted that dialogue with Islamabad was important and there can be no progress without it.

“It was Dr Manmohan Singh who clearly confirmed that when you do discuss to the Pakistanis maybe out of the general public eye in an uninterrupted and uninterruptible approach, you possibly can resolve even the difficulty of Kashmir. After all, there was a four-point settlement that had been drafted and just about agreed upon and it was not as a result of the Pakistanis withdrew from that four-point settlement on Kashmir, however as a result of the federal government of (Pervez) Musharraf fell into problem and ultimately fell that the dialogue was interrupted,” he said.

There is need to understand that any dialogue with Pakistan is going to suffer setbacks, is going to take time and we need to have the patience and persistence, to establish a viable relationship with Pakistan, he said.

“So lengthy as Pakistan is an albatross round our necks, we simply won’t be able to take our due place on this planet. It is ludicrous to counsel that India is the ‘vishwaguru’ after we do not know what to do with our neighbour,” Mr Aiyar claimed.

Mr Aiyar makes a robust case for good relations between the 2 international locations within the e-book as nicely, saying widespread Pakistanis not solely converse the identical language as us and share a lot of the identical ‘tehzeeb’ (tradition), they love Bollywood and its music and snicker on the identical jokes and befriend us in all places exterior the subcontinent.
 

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