India-Pakistan
Peace Train
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
The United Religions Initiative (URI)
is sponsoring a peace train from India to Pakistan on January
12 and a peace assembly in Multan from January 13 to 16
to promote people-to-people contact between the two countries.
The San Francisco-based URI with branches in 50 countries,
aims at promoting global peace and justice through interfaith
cooperation.
Elaborating on the theme of the URI project, Danesh Chandra,
co-founder of the Foundation for Human and Economic Development
(FHED), said that the peace train alludes to the trains
which transported thousands and thousands of people who
were uprooted by the partition and many of the partition
survivors still carry those bitter memories. The objective
of the peace train is to help in healing those wounds, he
added.
According to the co-founder of the India-Pakistan Peace
Coalition, Ras Siddiqui, the URI project will cost $ 40,000
dollars of which $10,000 has already been raised while South
Asian peace groups here hav e launched an intensive fund-raising
campaign to raise the rest $ 30,000.
The URI’s peace train and the assembly will include
50 delegates from Pakistan, 80 from India and 10 from Nepal,
Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Korea, Philippines, Indonesia and
the US.
Ras Siddiqui said that people-to-people contact is vital
to help bring durable peace in South Asia and such projects
would surely strengthen recent peace initiatives between
India and Pakistan. “The peace train would foster
alliances for peace building among people in religious traditions
and also encourage people and especially youth to visit
each other in these countries,” he stated.
Ras Siddiqui revealed that the URI peace train and peace
assembly project is supported among others by Dr. Javed
Iqbal, retired Chief Justice of Pakistan and founding member
of the URI in Pakistan, Maulana Abdul Khabir Azad, Imam
of the Badshahi Mosque Lahore and Chairman of the Majlas-e-Ulama
Pakistan, and Father James Channan, ordained Pakistani Catholic
Priest, Director of the Dominican Order of Pakistan and
Director of the Pastoral Institute at Multan. The project
is also supported by Dr. Mohinder Singh, Director, National
Institute of Punjab Studies, New Delhi, India, and Member
of the URI Global Council for the Asia region.
The India-Pakistan Peace Coalition is a leading US peace
group aimed at promoting peace and understanding in South
Asia through people-to-people contact. In August last, the
Coalition hosted a roundtable with a joint India-Pakistan
newsmen delegation.
PETITION: Meanwhile, the Association for Communal Harmony
in Asia (ACHA), an Oregon-based group, has launched a petition
signature campaign urging President Pervez Musharraf of
Pakistan and Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh “to
build a suitable monument at the Wagah-Attari Border as
a memorial to the victims of the Partition violence.”
The petition points out that “millions of people suffered
loss of honour, life, family , homes, livelihood, and sense
of well being, on both sides of the India-Pakistan border,
in the tragic aftermath of the Partition, in 1947.
“Many survivors still carry the scars of their suffering.
Also, for more than a half-century, the wounds of Partition
have embittered relationship between the people of India
and Pakistan.
”We hope this memorial will also serve as a symbol
of ending of the armed conflicts and hostilities of the
past, and of beginning of a new era of cooperation, peace,
and friendship between the great people of the two countries,”
the peition concluded.
This petition can be signed at: http://www.petitiononline.com/ippeace/petition.html
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