Pak Spring?
I said to a hall filled with Lahore’s liberal elite at the Pearl Continental, that one reason we were always struggling in our bilateral relations was that we were still governed by poorly evolved systems. So Pakistan, I said, was as imperfect a dictatorship as India was an imperfect democracy. Explanation: the Pakistanis had not quite denied their citizens all the freedoms that genuine dictatorships like North Korea, China, Iraq and Libya (then) did, or they would not have me, an Indian, saying rude things about their rulers to a full hall in Lahore. Similarly, I said, we in India had not yet quite succeeded in giving our people all the freedoms and rights that a classical, liberal democracy ought to. This, by the way, was also the year of the Gujarat riots. Both countries, I added, needed to move in opposite directions, we to make our democracy more perfect, and Pakistan, to make its dictatorship even more imperfect. Then, we might reach a middle ground where we, our establishments and peoples, find it easier to
