New Delhi: With India silently flexing muscle and inducting the Apache helicopters to provide more sharpened teeth to the IAF, Pakistan seemed to be cowering with the odds staked against it: in the last two days, Islamabad has piped down with Prime Minister Imran Ahmed Khan Niazi claiming Pakistan’s No-First-Use nuclear policy and Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureishi, who earlier threatened to raise the Jammu and Kashmir issue at the UN later this month, suddenly favouring a dialogue with India.
Of course, Pakistan is trying to put up a better face before the FATF this month.
Now ground reality has also forced an ebullient Pakistan Government to allow import of life-saving drugs from India with which it had scrapped all business relations after New Delhi abrogated the special status of Jammu and Kashmir and bifurcated the border state in two Union Territories in August.
Despite escalating tensions between the two countries over the Jammu and Kashmir issue, Pakistan was forced to climb down from its high horse to allow import of essential drugs, whose scarcity has created a health crisis in parts of the country, according to a media report on Tuesday.
Last month, Pakistan had downgraded its diplomatic relations and formally suspended its trade relations with India which maintained that J&K was an integral part of India and the issue was strictly internal to New Delhi.
Pakistan’s ministry of commerce, through a statutory regulatory order, gave the permission to import from and export of medicines from/ to India, Geo TV reported.
Trade relations between the two countries had soured after the Pulwama terror attack as India had imposed 200 per cent customs duty on all goods imported from Pakistan. Islamabad imported over $36 million worth of anti-rabies and anti-venom vaccines from India over the last 16 months.
According to reports, export of medicines to India was also permitted by the Pakistan Ministry of Commerce which issued a statutory regulatory order in this regard.
