Young India and Pakistan want prosperity, not war

The leadership must unleash their potential and break free from past animosities

Sooner or later, whether Pakistan shoots down more Indian planes or India drops more bombs inside Pakistan, this war euphoria will die down and most people in both countries will go back to their poor, miserable lives. Once boasting the second largest global GDP, the subcontinent is now home to perhaps the biggest sea of poverty in the world. That doesn’t say much about how we’ve conducted ourselves in the 70 or so years we have been independent, does it?

One must live with hundreds of infant deaths each year because the government just can’t do anything about it. The other, despite its meteoric economic rise and global prestige, struggles to provide working toilets for a majority of its population. Yet their defence hardware is tip-top; some produced locally but most of it bought for top dollar in the international market. After all, if the militaries didn’t have the muscle, how would the politicians throw mud at each other? Once you look at things in perspective, the priorities begin to make sense. Or do they?

Even the simplest journalistic exercise — collecting and processing information — will tell you that the average, working-class Joes on both sides have little or no appetite for war. And once journalists and tourists interacted in the cricket series that came with the confidence building measure a little more than a decade ago, they pleasantly found out that there was actually a lot of mutual admiration and respect; definitely a lot of hospitality.

It makes perfect sense. Both countries have predominantly young populations. As noted once before in this space, the recent UN report says Pakistan currently has the largest percentage of young people ever recorded. About 64 per cent of the population is below 30 years of age. On the other side, more than half of India’s one-and-a-half billion people are less than 25 years old, and 65 per cent are below 35. That makes us some of the ‘youngest countries’ in the world at a time when the average age in much of Europe and the US is around 40.

And, sure, we all line up and dance to war drums whenever our leaders tell us the national honour is at stake and all that, but most of us would rather keep our jobs, advance our careers, raise our children and, whenever possible, play our little part in helping everyone get ahead, etc. If only our leaders could link our precious, and always so vulnerable, national honour with fighting poverty, keeping children

alive and at least getting everybody a bathroom, perhaps at some point someone would question just what business such poor countries have spending on bombs and rockets in the first place.

Also, frankly, since most of the people are so young and our problems rooted in a blood feud of long, long ago, most of us don’t even know why we must always fight or hate each other. We’ve just been told that we must. If only we were told to engage in commerce and generate wealth, wouldn’t we all eventually realise that trading is better than fighting because everybody lives better at the end of the day?

It was, after all, precisely because of India’s fabled trade potential that it attracted wealth enough to contribute 35 per cent to global GDP just before the Brits came with the East India Company and grew rich eating off our land. Records going back to Roman times show senators complaining about the gold and silver drain to India because their upper-class women just couldn’t do without our fine linen and muslin products — light as woven air they were called.

And, granted, the Brits left us beaten and broken. But it’s not exactly as if we’ve done a stand up job since then. We’ve fought more than we’ve talked, and we’ve made sure we never even begin exploring what riches we can earn just by trading with each other. In the process, we’ve also rendered regional trading initiatives like Saarc completely lifeless. And now we don’t even play anymore. Even when we become patriotic, ready to die for the motherland, we fail to understand how anybody in either high command can feel proud of these ‘achievements’.

The only way to unscramble this egg is to stop looking back, right now, and just walk away from the past. The voting public in both countries is, again, young with much to look forward to. If their leaders will not give them peace and commerce, they must vote in a different set of leaders who will.

Enough of this war and talk of more war. The sooner we look in the mirror, remember where we stand, and realise which direction we must finally take, the better for us all.

If only our leaders could link our precious, and always so vulnerable, national honour with fighting poverty, keeping children alive and at least getting everybody a bathroom, perhaps at some point someone would question just what business such poor countries have spending on bombs and rockets in the first place.