India, Pakistan should look to the Koreas for inspiration
It is in the national and regional interests of both countries to bring about peace along the borders
An afternoon siesta is a luxury for a journalist even on his off days. But April 27, 2018, turned out to be different. Replaying the defining moments when history was made at the Truce Village of Panmunjom by South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, I felt a part of myself depart to hug the leaders. I fell into a trance, reflecting on how the inter-Korean rendezvous can be a source of inspiration for peaceful engagement among parties to some of the longest standing conflicts on the planet. Majority might call it a frivolous daydream, still it’s worth exploring because it’s a dream of the victims who have endured years of suffering. Not just mine.
The world has transformed rapidly in the last few decades. Some wars have ended. Some new ones have taken birth. International conflict management and big-hearted leaders have brought about epoch-making changes in Northern Ireland, East Timor, Nepal, Basque Country, Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo.
There is an equally exhaustive list of flash points that require urgent attention but are conveniently forgotten in order to serve geopolitical interests. Some of these conflicts are kept simmering because once they are doused, the perpetrators would lose their relevance on the global arena. Many organisations that play political town criers would risk their existence. Their annual gatherings would lose all the pomp and circumstance, and their communiques would lose their bite. Conflicts would cease to become an ideological cash cow for manipulators.
I wasn’t brought up to hate my neighbour. Love thy neighbour is the commandment ingrained in every Indian’s moral system from a young age. I suppose that’s how it is in other countries, as well. I have no reason to believe otherwise. As we grow up, the state and politics corrupt the minds by making us believe how good we are and how bad they are. As a professional I have happened to rub shoulders with more Chinese and Pakistani journalists than their Indian counterparts. We worked as a team. We visited each other. We celebrated each other’s festivals. We discussed the thorny relations between our nations. And we pulled each other’s legs, without malice.
We could laugh at each other without getting hurt. Jamil Akhtar, Najmul Hasan Rizvi, Tahir Mirza, Mahir Ali, Steve Manual, Khwaja Zubair are some of the tall names I hold close to my heart. I am sure my telephone calls from Kerala to Karachi would have been a headache for people at Indian telcos.
It’s heartening, at a time when the Indo-Pak cacophony has reached its pinnacle, that some sane voices in Pakistan media have made a comparison between the renewed engagement between the two Koreas and the freeze in ties in the subcontinent. “The tensions and disputes between Pakistan and India are fundamentally different to the issues between the Koreas. Pakistan and India have forged very different and irreversible histories, whereas the Koreas seek unification. Yet, a shared history and the common dreams and aspirations of a people with enduring cultural and other similarities across India and Pakistan make the quest for normalisation and peace in this region the noblest of goals,” one of Pakistan’s mainstream newspapers, The Dawn, writes in a commentary. Recalling the unprecedented hope and expectations created by the historic trip to Lahore of the then Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in 1999, The Dawn says it is time for the leaderships of India and Pakistan to once again tread the path of peace.
Singing the same tune is the Lahorebased newspaper Daily Times. “When will the Indo-Pak leadership demonstrate the required maturity to break this impasse that has endured 70 bleak years? It is in their respective national and regional interests to do so. Certainly, the peoples of both sides would benefit enormously,” says a commentary in Daily Times.
“While responsibility for this rests primarily with Islamabad and New Delhi, the international community must play a supporting role,” says the Times, suggesting that a good way to start would be to stop selling arms to both the nations. If not for the persisting border tensions, the paper says, the Rs1.1 trillion Pakistan has earmarked for defence spending this fiscal year could have been invested in the country’s citizenry.
Great thoughts, indeed! Sad that such reflections never occurred on the other side of the border. Maybe because the Indians rightfully feel that every positive step in the past had been reciprocated with a negative move. The Kargil invasion by Pakistan-backed militants came after Vajpayee undertook an unprecedented bus journey in 1999 to the Pakistani city of Lahore for a summit with the then prime minister Nawaz Sharif. The so-called Spirit of Lahore was intended to break the ice between two south Asian giants. Instead, the Indians felt betrayed by the invasion.
India’s present prime minister Narendra Modi followed in Vajpayee’s footsteps by inviting Sharif to attend his inauguration in 2014. The two leaders met a couple of times in 2015 before Modi would make a surprise visit to Lahore to meet Sharif, the first visit of an Indian leader to Pakistan in more than a decade. In September 2016, Pakistan-backed militants attacked a remote Indian Army base in Uri, near the Line of Control, killing 18 Indian soldiers in the deadliest attack on the Indian armed forces in decades. The Indians felt betrayed again. Tensions have since remained high between the nuclear-armed neighbours.
The Spirit of Panmunjom should serve as a source of positivity to kickstart the stalled Indo-Pak dialogue. There are still voices within the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party who would welcome normalisation of ties. Political partisans in the opposition must stop their witch-hunt every time the ruling party makes a peace move. There’s no alternative to peace between India and Pakistan who have so much in common. We share culture and traditions, art and music, cuisine, language, dress, names and much more. Marriages are made across the borders. The curtains that hang in my home were a gift from a friend from Pakistan. My wife and daughter wear clothes bought from a Pakistan stall at the Dubai Global Village.
I have no reason to believe we should remain enemies. We may have different religiopolitical philosophies but that shouldn’t be allowed to stand in our way to becoming a combined power — sealed by a non-aggression pact — that could resolve many a problem that plagues the region, let alone Kashmir. The benefits are infinite. We just need a couple of principled bravehearts among the highest echelon of governments on both sides. Then it’s a matter of time.
There’s no alternative to peace between India and Pakistan who have so much in common