NEW DELHI: In a bid to play an international role, former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is organizing a conference of Opposition leaders of South Asian countries next month.
Opposition leaders from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh will be participating in the two day conference, slated to begin on September 8 in the port city of Karachi. Former Prime Minister V.P. Singh, who leads the Janata Dal in the Lok Sabha will be the sole Indian leader to attend the conference. He will be leaving for Karachi on September 6.
Bhutto had also invited BJP stalwart L.K.Advani, who is the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, but he declined the invitation.
Janata Dal sources reveal that in her letter to Singh, Bhutto specifically mentioned that Advani had already accepted the invitation. They feel that the BJP leaders, on second thought, developed cold feet and decided not to attend the proposed conference.
However, V.P. Singh seems to have made up his mind to make full use of this opportunity and extract the maximum mileage out of it. A request has been made to Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif for a meeting between him and Singh.
Moreover, the Mandal messiah also plans to deliver a lecture in Karachi on South-Asian Relations in the Post-Cold War Era. The organizational details of this are yet to be worked out. According to Janata Dal sources, Singh wants to go to Islamabad at least for a day and, on his way back, would like to spend some time in Lahore too.
The conference assumes significance as it would focus on the problems of fledgling democracies which have recently been revived in South Asian countries such as Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan, Also, it would provide an occasion for high-level contact between leaders of India and Pakistan on a non-governmental plane. Whether it will actually help the process of building bridges between the two countries remains to be seen.
Article extracted from this publication >> September 11, 1992
