In the name of the people

Will Agra make up for 54 wasted years?

PAMELA PHILIPOSE

If words were all, relations between India and Pakistan would have been far better than they are today. Consider this track record from news reports:

* SEPTEMBER 19, 1960: Mr Nehru, who had arrived in Karachi on September 19, was greeted by large crowds when he drove through the city to President’s House. After laying a wreath at the tomb of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, he attended a civic reception at Frere Hall, where he declared that he was ‘‘happy to come to end an old controversy and bring to the people of Pakistan a message of friendship and hope of closer co-operation.’’

* JULY 3, 1972: Mr Bhutto said at Chandigarh (after signing the Shimla Agreement) that he and the Prime Minister, Mrs Gandhi, had taken a very important step and it was now ‘‘for the people of both countries to decide what kind of future they would like to have.’’

* DECEMBER 31, 1988: Rajiv Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto signed three agreements in Islamabad: on nuclear facilities, cultural cooperation and trade. The second agreement aimed at ‘‘promoting and developing relations (between the people of both countries) in the realms of art, culture, archaeology, mass media and sports...’’

* FEBRUARY 20, 1999: At the Wagah border, Vajpayee’s arrival statement went this way, ‘‘I bring the goodwill and hopes of my fellow Indians who seek abiding peace and harmony with Pakistan.’’

Who are these people? These cheering crowds, these disembodied entities who float in and out of bilateral treaties like ghosts, that faceless presence that is routinely evoked when the desire for peace between nations is expressed? The tragedy of the subcontinent has been precisely this, that people — real people not those who inhabit parchment — did not really matter when the time came to do business and ensure that the lasting peace of official rhetoric became reality. Governments and their bureaucracies have largely operated under the assumption that an implacable animosity between the two countries is the natural order of things.

Yet people want peace. As part of the media delegation which had accompanied Prime Minister Vajpayee to Lahore during that ‘‘defining moment’’ which alas had remained undefined, one met many on both sides of the border who spoke out for an immediate end to this unending saga of hostility. From P.M. Handa, a retired railway official, standing outside the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi for a visa, who told me that ‘‘we are a sentimental people’’ and must be allowed to visit each other freely, to Mohammed Rafi, proprietor of Hotel Rafiq in Lahore’s Anarkali Bazaar, who wanted to know why, if the EU did away with visas, can’t India and Pakistan do so. ‘‘People are forcibly restrained in the name of politics,’’ he observed with a wisdom emanating from his experience rather than textbooks on political realism.

Clearly then it is not just a bright bird of passage like Indian cyclist Vikas Singh, now doing hard labour in a Peshawar jail, or the occasional boatload of Pakistani fishermen who strayed too far into the Sir Creek area, who have had to pay the price for this, but the entire population of both countries. In the first Human Development in South Asia report, Pakistan’s developmental economist, the late Dr Mahbub ul Haq, characterised South Asia — which largely comprises India and Pakistan — as the poorest region, the most illiterate region, the most malnourished region, the least gender sensitive region, the region with the highest human deprivation, and the most militarised region in the world. It’s a killing combination, these six parameters. Through their tunnel vision, our respective governments, our successive governments, are guilty of nothing less than perpetrating a crime against humanity by laying waste full five decades and more.

National interest, as constructed by them, have led to armed warfare breaking out at regular intervals and taking a high toll of human life; an entire state being reduced to an armed camp and defence spending eating into national budgets. It is in the nation’s interest that ‘‘security experts’’ suggest earmarking anything from Rs 70,000 crore to a sum several times that, over the next 10 years, for the establishment of what they term is a ‘‘credible nuclear deterrent’’. If this is national interest, then surely neither nation deserves such ‘‘interest’’?

So how have governments and opinion-makers got away with such obscenities? By a combination of appearing to work in the ‘‘supreme interest’’ of the nation and by demonising the ‘‘enemy’’. There is often a serious disjuncture in the way a nation’s interest is constructed by the elite and as it is per- ceived by ordinary people and it is through the process of demonisation that this disjuncture is managed. Through government statements, political speeches, newspaper articles, school textbooks, the ‘‘enemy’’ is per- ceived as blood-thirsty hordes of faceless ‘‘Hindus’’ or ‘‘Muslims’’ out to destroy your homes and families. It is through this alchemy of hate that the mindsets of ordinary people become militarised and communalised.

Those who didn’t fall in line, or who dared to hope for an alternative future for the two nations, who wanted to ensure that the subcontinent does not become the theatre for a nuclear apocalypse, who wanted their respective governments to sort out their differences through reasoned negotiations, who wanted the Kashmiris to be given back their voices, who desired nothing more than that their respective nations be allowed to get on with life, were reviled as bleeding hearts, track-two crackpots, left-wing loonies or plain traitors to the national cause. Yet it was, ironically enough, these much-abused candlewallahs, former armymen, chirpy schoolkids, women’s groups, who kept that flickering candle — the idea of friendship between the two sides — alive during the darkest moments in the history of India and Pakistan. Moments when wars broke out, when nuclear devices were exploded, when acts of horrendous terrorism were perpetrated, when normal diplomatic ties between the two had all but ended. Ultimately, it is the reservoirs of goodwill they built that the leaders of governments, when they get to their much hyped summits, attempt to tap.

The tableau to be enacted against the backdrop of Shah Jehan’s mausoleum to undying love, may be just that — a tableau. It may only be a device to protect one actor from growing popular disillusionment over indifferent governance, and the other, from charges of illegitimately acquiring power. But the people of both countries have a stake in its outcome. They don’t want Urdu couplets, they don’t want more platitudes on brotherhood, and they are sick of being told about what the leaders ate at the official banquets. They want nothing less than a well-defined road map of how to exit from a history of enormous hatred, colossal devastation and lost opportunities, the value of which can never be estimated.