Pak daily against accepting India's 'puny aid'

The Pakistan government might have accepted India's offer for flood aid, but Pakistanis on Saturday appeared sharply divided over the issue, with critics claiming that the acceptance came on United States' call.

Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, who was at the United Nations to attend an emergency session of the General Assembly on Pakistan's floods, said on Friday that the government of Pakistan had accepted the Indian offer of $5 million.

"The government has accepted India's aid offer on US' call," said Senator Raja Zafar ul Haq, chairman of Muslim League - Nawaz.

"It was earlier reported in the media but the foreign minister made it public on Friday. The US had urged Pakistan to accept India's aid offer," Haq said in comments published in the Jang newspaper.

Former foreign minister Abdul Sattar told the daily that Pakistan must have kept in mind incidents in the past but did not elaborate.

"It is beyond understanding why the government accepted the offer after a few days," he said.

There were, however, people who backed the government's decision to say yes to India's offer, at the time of an unprecedented disaster in the country. Former foreign secretary Akram Zaki said it would not be suitable to decline India's offer when Pakistan is making an appeal to the world seeking aid.

"Pakistan has been calling for a dialogue to improve relations with India and rejection of the offer would cause hurdle in relations," Zaki said.

But the harshest criticism came from the editor of The Nation daily, Shireen Mazar, who wrote that the government of Pakistan had shown its subservience to the US by accepting the "puny amount of $5 million".

She wrote that accepting aid from India at a time when people in Kashmir were agitating and "India is targeting Pakistan on false charges again on a regular basis, is a shame for the entire nation".

She recalled that Pakistan had accepted Indian assistance in the 2005 Kashmir earthquake as well, but said that aid was in kind and the two sides of Kashmir had been opened up on humanitarian grounds. "But even at that time, we had refused to accept India's offer of helicopters for relief work - an offer which also had the condition that Indian crew members would come with these copters," she wrote.

Pakistan has been hit by the worst floods in 80 years, which have soaked one fifth of its land, killed more than 1,500 people and impacted an estimated population of 20 million. Nearly 6 million Pakistanis are in need of emergency aid, which include 3.5 million children.