Capital View

Daring to dream

Rabindra Seth

Prime minister Manmohan Singh's dream of breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Kabul, shared with a select audience at FICCI in the capital the other day is a dream harboured by India's tourism fraternity. For long they have been hoping (and praying) for friendly relations with Pakistan and peace in Afghanistan for this dream to materialise. Remember, right until the outbreak of hostilities in Afghanistan as much as eight per cent of overseas arrivals into India came by the land route via Iran and Afghanistan. An overland bus bringing this segment of visitors was a familiar sight in the parking lot of New Delhi's Connaught Place. Then came the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1989 and the overland coach became history.

Conscious of our neighbour's sensitivities, the prime minister was careful to preface his vision with words that left no room for misunderstanding or misinterpretation. "I earnestly hope that relations between our two countries become so friendly and we generate such an atmosphere of trust between each other that the two nations would be able to agree on a treaty of peace, security and friendship. I dream of a day, while retaining our respective identities, one can have breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Kabul. That is how my forefathers lived. That is how I want our grandchildren to live," he said with great emotion. The reference to grandchildren shows his realism that his dream is not likely to become a reality soon.

Shadow lines

Those with long memories will remember that the concept of breakfast in one city, lunch in another and dinner in yet another city in two other countries sadly came to the world's notice courtesy Adolf Hitler who boasted (and lived up to it) at the start of World War II that he would have breakfast in Berlin, lunch in Amsterdam and dinner in Paris the same day. Fortuitously, it is now used in the context of friendly visits.

To this writer, the prime minister's moving wish list is a reminder of an interview with the then Pakistan tourism minister, the former ruler of Chitral state at ITB, Berlin in 1993. Before I had fired my first question, he told me in a gesture that appeared to me a curt refusal to discuss India-Pakistan tourism possibilities but which in fact was his vision of what lay beyond the two neighbours. His disarming words to me in Pushtu, a language I had spoken in my childhood, were "Why do you want to confine yourself to India and Pakistan? Why don't you look beyond, there is Afghanistan, Iran and all of central Asia. If there can be as free a movement of people as it exists in Europe and other friendly neighbourhoods in the west, I can foresee millions of Indians and Pakistanis visiting not only each other but the entire length and breadth of central and south Asia." He added for effect, "We will no longer have to depend on the westerners and their dollars or Deutsch Marks."

Intra-regional traffic

What the Pakistan minister was saying was in fact the norm in the international tourism scenario. Then and even now, the bulk of the movements of the mind-boggling figures of tourists travelling internationally are within regions. Some 715 million tourists travelled across international frontiers in 2005 (the estimated figure for 2006 is 808 million). But if one looks at the count of movements within regions, a different picture emerges. For instance in North America, as much as 80 per cent of the movements are between Canada, USA, Mexico and the Caribbean. Or take Europe, where the figure is even higher at 90 per cent partly because of short distances and ease of travel by road. Asia Pacific tells a different story. Overall regional movement is projected at 65 per cent, thanks largely to bulk contributions by Australia, Japan and China. But South Asia stands out much lower on the scale with a count of 26 per cent. Political tensions, armed conflicts and unfriendly borders are the obvious reasons for this disparity.

India's own share of the regional market is another tell tale. Of the nearly four million foreign visitors, as many as over 5,00,000 came from Bangladesh, more than 1,00,000 from Sri Lanka but only 45,000 or so from Pakistan. Interestingly, data published by the tourism ministry does not list Bangladesh among the top markets although in
numbers it is number one followed by UK and USA. But that is another matter.

To come back to the emotions Dr Manmohan Singh has evoked among those who have the good of tourism in their hearts, it is certainly worth daring to dream.

(The writer is a freelance journalist. He can be reached at rabseth@yahoo.com)