NEW DELHI, 1 February 2004 — Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said yesterday that he wanted peace and friendship with all its neighbors, including Pakistan. He said dialogue with Pakistan was aimed at making a transition from mistrust to trust, discord to concord and tension to peace.
Stating that India had always believed in peaceful, friendly and cooperative relations with all its neighbors, Vajpayee said the Islamabad SAARC summit was a major step toward regional cooperation.
“As I said at the summit, we have to change South Asia’s image and standing in the world. We must make the bold transition from mistrust to trust, from discord to concord and from tension to peace,” Vajpayee told a two-day “Global Convention on Peace and Non-Violence” here.
“It is in the same spirit that my government has been trying to resolve all the outstanding issues with Pakistan through dialogue.” He was addressing intellectuals, artists and peaceniks gathered for the convention organized to mark Mahatma Gandhi’s death anniversary.
Former German President Richard Weizsacker, former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid and former secretary-general of Organization of African Unity Salim Ahmed Salim shared the dais with him.
Vajpayee said India was alive to its responsibility to contribute to peace, friendship and cooperation both in this region and around the world.
“India has never been an aggressor nation, a colonizer or a hegemon in her long history,” he remarked, referring to the country’s legacy of peace and brotherhood.
Emphasizing on Gandhi’s abiding ideology of non-violence, Vajpayee said nations that went to war and groups that fought each other would sooner or later realize the “futility of bloodshed and the utility of dialogue”.
According to him, terrorism inspired by religious extremism was one of the new threats to world peace, one perhaps no country had suffered as much as India had.
“The threat of terrorism has to be dealt with firmly — both through the action of individual nations and through international solidarity.”
Rather optimistically he added: “However, I am confident that this is a passing phase and the world’s collective efforts will succeed in dealing with this menace.
“Among other things, my optimism lies in the fact that all religions and cultures of the world have enshrined peace and non-violence as their guiding principles.”
Vajpayee said strengthening the UN and self-restraint from bigger nations were important to global peace.
While asserting that the UN was the single most important deterrent against major wars after World War II, he said: “However, the UN system needs to be reformed and restructured to accurately reflect contemporary realities as well as to make it more effective in dealing with the challenges of today’s world.”
