Underlining that India is ready to go the 'extra mile' for a better future for South Asia, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Wednesday said the country wants friendly relations with Pakistan but diplomatic initiatives will founder if terrorism continues.
He said stronger cooperation offers immense benefits to all parties and that India's neighbours 'can and should share in our drive for prosperity.'
"The future of the Indian sub-continent depends on whether open mindedness prevails over the more traditional mindsets. On its part, India has extended its hand in all directions and is willing to go the extra mile for a better future," Mukherjee said addressing the 46th National Defence Course in New Delhi.
Talking about India-Pakistan relations, he said it is at the cross-roads today and the coming decade would be crucial.
"It is not possible for us to change borders, but we can surely reduce the salience of borders in our relationship," the minister said while delivering the lecture on 'Indian foreign policy: A road map for the decade ahead.'
He said India has endeavoured to do precisely that with a series of initiatives that promote people-to-people relations.
"In the process, what has emerged is the deep yearning amongst ordinary people and normalcy," Mukherjee said, adding that sustaining and expanding this process would be one of the important challenges of India's foreign policy.
"But this (sustaining of the process with Pakistan) can happen only when diplomacy is allowed to function without interruption," he said, adding: "If, on the other hand, terrorism is perceived and practiced as an instrument of statecraft, then the most imaginative diplomacy will founder on lack of domestic support."
Mukherjee, who assumed charge of the ministry less than a month back, said he wanted the country's foreign policy to pay particular attention to each bilateral relation in the neighbourhood from Myanmar to Afghanistan and provide them with 'depth and diversity of mutually-beneficial interaction.'
The external affairs minister, however, said that a focus on the neighbourhood does not imply a parochial or near-sighted approach to world affairs but India's foreign policy today looks as the country's environment in expanding circles of engagement starting with immediate neighbourhood of West Asia, Central Asia, South East Asia and the Indian Ocean region.
India's relations with the major powers like US, EU, Russia, China and Japan as well as emerging powers of Latin America and Africa have undergone a major makeover in the past decade and a half, he said.
"India's foreign policy would need to actively promote the building of a qualitatively different relationship with the major powers in the decade thus contributing positively to our political, economic and security objectives," Mukherjee said.
