Mindful of the inflamed passion the conferring of the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status to India generated in Pakistan, both the countries on Saturday decided to give the acronym a quiet burial and agreed to work under a Non-Discriminatory Market Access (NDMA) regime and also agreed on opening up the Wagah-Attari border round the clock.
The reason behind the change in the nomenclature was not lost on Commerce Minister Anand Sharma, who while explaining the rationale of NDMA, said, “MFN is an acronym of WTO. When nations engage, they engage bilaterally. Both Pakistan and India are members of the WTO. We agreed to NDMA, as is (done) between large economies of the world.”
Ever since Pakistan had granted the MFN status, its literal meaning in Urdu (Sabse Pasandeeda Mulk) had been raising the hackles within socio-political circles in that country as the general feeling prevailed that how could arch rival India be conferred such a status.
Sharma, therefore, said that it was not the first time that such a terminology will be used, and added that it is there even between the US and China and so many other countries. “So, I feel one is not to be trapped in a literal meaning,” he added.
His Pakistani counterpart Khurram Dastagir Khan said, “NDMA is an unmediated reflection of what is actually going to happen. Business leaders of both the sides never said that we want this name or that name. They just want market access. It is a much better reflective term... let us not be stranded on nomenclature and move forward.”
After talks with Khan, Sharma informed the media that both the nations had decided to “intensify and accelerate the process of trade normalisation, liberalisation and facilitation and will implement the agreed measures before the end of February 2014”. “For that to happen, we have agreed to open Wagah-Attari border 24X7 for trade... We will also allow both the sides, the movement of containers to the container terminals through Wagah-Attari to Amritsar and lahore respectively,” he said.
India and Pakistan, he said will convene meeting of technical working group of customs, railways, banking, and energy to device the modalities for effective implementation of requisite measures. The ministerial-level meeting, which took place after a gap of 16 months, has also deliberated on the need to relax visa regime and facilitate the entry of banks in each other’s country.
The central banks of the two countries have been negotiating and, in-principal, it has been agreed between the State Bank of Pakistan and the Reserve Bank of India to give banking licences to the banks nominated by the respective governments.
“The visa facilitation is something that I raised in the Saarc Ministers’ meeting with the Prime Minister of India. There is something we need to work towards visa liberalisation and facilitation,” the Pakistani Minister said.