Pak organisations to resume exchanges with India

Two leading Pakistani organisations have announced that they will immediately resume the exchange of delegations with India and proposed the creation of a joint commission to combat the threat of extremism in the region.

Fakhar Zaman, chairman of both the World Punjabi Congress and the Pakistan Academy of Letters, has said the exchange of delegations will resume with two teams soon visiting India. A delegation of Pakistani writers, intellectuals, artists and educationists will visit the Patiala University later this month while another team will travel to Amritsar, Chandigarh, Patiala and New Delhi in February as part of efforts to resume people-to-people contacts, he said.

Zaman said delegations of Indian writers and intellectuals are expected to visit Pakistan in March and April. In this regard, he also called for the constitution of a joint commission to tackle the threat of extremism. "The World Punjabi Congress has always advocated resumption of peace process between the two countries," he said.

Indo-Pakistan peace initiatives should not be limited to economy alone writers, intellectuals, artistes, poets and educationists should be included in the campaign as durable peace is not possible without strengthening cultural relations between the two countries, he said.

"The governments of India and Pakistan should help strengthen the peace process not only by reducing their respective defence budgets but also by liberalising their visa regimes," Zaman said. Both governments, he suggested, should ensure the revision of textbooks to expunge material that poisons the impressionable minds of students.

Cultural exchanges between the two countries came to a halt in the wake of the Mumbai terror attacks in November 2008. In the past few months, there have been limited people-to-people contacts between the two sides.