TKFR.com

By Fareeha Qay­oom

Friend of mine started a dis­cus­sion on our for­eign pol­icy the other day on Pakistanloversforum.com – the ques­tion he asked was pretty sim­ple – peace with India but on what grounds? He invited me to take part in the dis­cus­sion as well. What I said actu­ally con­cluded that par­tic­u­lar dis­cus­sion and shut every­one up!

Photo by SpreePiX — Berlin

I wrote on Jan­u­ary 9^th 2010, “In my opin­ion, there can be no mean­ing­ful peace between India and Pak­istan — if that had been pos­si­ble, Pak­istan would not have been cre­ated to begin with. If you remem­ber your his­tory — Jin­nah served in con­gress for years work­ing on the­ory of “United India” before going the other way (cre­ation of sep­a­rate home­land for the Muslims)…he tried giv­ing peace a chance then…furthermore, the sit­u­a­tion with Kash­mir was cre­ated because India didn’t want a fair divi­sion of assets as agreed in the par­ti­tion agreement…what’s hap­pen­ing with Mus­lims in India — to be suc­cess­ful, you have to assim­i­late in the society…the most pop­u­lar and suc­cess­ful Mus­lim in India is Shahrukh Khan — to be accepted in the soci­ety — he mar­ried a Hindu lady (it could have been a love match, but Mus­lim men actu­ally are not allowed to marry women belong­ing to idol­a­trous reli­gions accord­ing to their reli­gion– they can only marry Jews or Chris­tians and that too because they all believe in one God, the God of Abra­ham. So he has pub­licly gone against his God and reli­gion). Big­otry and bias will always be there and there­fore, discrimination…you watch the Indian movies…haven’t you ever noticed, the vil­lains are usu­ally played by Mus­lims? In fact, Shahrukh started his movie career as a vil­lain too? Fur­ther­more, in their movies, the vil­lains and gang lead­ers always have Mus­lim names? There is no social jus­tice for Mus­lims in non-Muslim lands — Jin­nah rec­og­nized this real­ity even­tu­ally and there­fore, started work­ing towards a sep­a­rate coun­try for Mus­lims…

Kash­mir is a big issue — on the face of it, in diplo­matic lan­guage, it’s about the right of self-determination — India or Pak­istan (no third option was dis­cussed in the UN Res­o­lu­tion!); how­ever, the under­ly­ing fac­tor that’s caus­ing the fric­tion is about water rights — Kash­mir con­tains the ori­gins of our fresh water rivers…you know glac­i­ers and stuff. India doesn’t want you to have it. You are not going to give up on it — your sur­vival depends on it…so stalemate-know what I mean?”

There the mat­ter rested for me…and then out of the blue, yes­ter­day (Jan 14^th 2010), a young friend of mine (she’s still in uni­ver­sity) sent me her ran­dom thoughts about the peace process, what our youth thinks about it (her con­tem­po­raries), the big­otry, hatred and lack of tol­er­ance dis­played by her friends for India and peo­ple of other reli­gions. That got me thinking…Do I hate India? Am I a closet bigot? Am I intol­er­ant about peo­ple of other reli­gions?

I don’t think I hate India. In fact, I don’t think I ever did even in my youth. When I worked in one multi­na­tional orga­ni­za­tion with home office in New York – the Indian office used to be the regional head­quar­ters and Pak­istan liai­son office actu­ally reported to her. Our boss was a Sikh. We had a very good work­ing rela­tion­ship with him. We had great fun com­mu­ni­cat­ing one-to-one with our Indian coun­ter­parts. How­ever, there was still friendly rivalry. (The same kind of rivalry that we dis­play over our cricket teams – we hate los­ing to India, they hate los­ing to us).  We would do our best to get orders placed in Pak­istan and they would do their best to get them placed in India.

When I moved on to a Hong Kong based multi­na­tional com­pany, I noticed our home office pre­ferred Indi­ans to us. There was no spe­cial hatred; just a pref­er­ence and they pre­ferred Hong Kong or the off-shore Ori­ent to India. Again, there was no spe­cial hatred; just a nat­ural pref­er­ence. I remem­ber my boss was actu­ally best friends with the Indian coun­try man­ager. She even vis­ited Pak­istan once. We took her around, threw a spe­cial party for her. Every­one had a good time. There was no hatred. She was very nice to us; we were very nice to her. We pre­ferred her to our Hong Kong coun­ter­parts – (we had more in com­mon with her than with our Hong Kong coun­ter­parts so it was actu­ally quite nat­ural). How­ever, since she was bet­ter friends with our home office man­agers and more vocal, she man­aged to cre­ate a lot of fric­tion behind the scenes (which was also nat­ural). A lot of our orders got trans­ferred to her region. Since she could under­stand Urdu, she quoted a lot of stuff out of con­text and made gen­eral trou­ble. It was naïve of us to actu­ally think she wouldn’t use under­hand tac­tics to under­mine us. We were stu­pid. That doesn’t mean I started hat­ing Indi­ans sud­denly.  Just because we are con­di­tioned to play fair, doesn’t mean our com­peti­tors have to also – you know, as they say it’s all fair in love and war. How­ever, it taught me some­thing – peo­ple pre­fer work­ing with peo­ple they can like, under­stand or com­mu­ni­cate with. Unfor­tu­nately, dif­fer­ences divide. Sim­i­lar­i­ties bring peo­ple together. The more sim­i­lar you are; the closer your bond and the bet­ter your rela­tion­ship.

Not that there ended my cul­tural exchange with Indi­ans. I also had to deal with a few apparel fac­to­ries in Mid­dle East; a lot of their staff was Indian as well. Again, we had a pretty good work­ing rela­tion­ship with them. At another job, one of my buy­ers was an Amer­i­can born Indian. I got on well with her. I never got any hate vibe or felt in any way dis­crim­i­nated against. When I was work­ing on Tkfr issue 13 back in 2005, I remem­ber I con­tacted a few of Indian design­ers over the net…Tarun Tahil­iani, Geisha Designs and Satya Paul were very nice to me, in fact, they were way over nicer than all the local design­ers put together! They sent me high res­o­lu­tion pho­tographs of their work, gave me exclu­sive stuff to quote in my mag­a­zine and were very friendly and busi­nesslike. All in all, it was a good expe­ri­ence there too.

As far as peo­ple of other reli­gions are con­cerned – I don’t con­sider myself a bigot there either. Yes, two of my friends and for­mer busi­ness col­leagues are Chris­tians. We have bro­ken bread together, laughed together and worked together. Our dif­fer­ences, if any, have never been on reli­gious grounds any­way but purely on pro­fes­sional grounds. I have cou­ple of friends in USA as well, I am not even sure if they are Jew­ish or Chris­t­ian, the ques­tion never came up…we exchange an occa­sional email every three years to say hi. I still have fond mem­o­ries of them. I trea­sure the book one of them sent me over one Christ­mas, a com­pi­la­tion of short sto­ries by writ­ers from her home town in Min­nesota because she knew even back in those days that I wrote and she wanted to encour­age me.

Peo­ple are peo­ple. They smile, they cry, they eat, they sleep, they talk, nor­mal every day human activ­ity. It’s uni­ver­sal and forms a com­mon bond between human­ity. What divides us is not any indi­vid­ual behav­ior but col­lec­tive behav­ior – so it’s never per­sonal. On indi­vid­ual one-to-one basis, we sim­ply can’t hate a fel­low human being, espe­cially if they are a total stranger! You have to know some­one deeply to feel hatred for them. Hatred unfor­tu­nately, can never be in the abstract. It’s not an intel­lec­tual exer­cise but about a feel­ing. So am I dis­turbed about the fact that my friend is dis­turbed about the grow­ing feel­ing of hatred she sees in her con­tem­po­raries for the Indi­ans?

No, I am not. Not because we are intol­er­ant peo­ple. Sim­ply because when we are young, we are more ide­al­is­tic and intel­lec­tual ideals mat­ter to us a lot plus youth is always hot blooded, more vocal and more emo­tional.  With matu­rity, you cool down and learn to sep­a­rate facts from feel­ings and look at things they way they are instead of what they ought to be and you learn to tol­er­ate the real­ity while you stick to your ideals. It’s as sim­ple as that. By the way, I don’t see a lot of Pak­ista­nis over the net putting fight­ing talk on pub­lic forums, but I do see a lot of Indi­ans express­ing their con­tempt for Pak­istan on them.  Try CNN some­time or BBC. Most of young Pak­ista­nis are all talk and no action so no, I am not wor­ried.

So back to the real ques­tion, can there be peace between India and Pak­istan? Yes, if both par­ties want peace and can arrive at equi­table solu­tion. How­ever, talk will not do it. You have to put your money where your mouth is – unfor­tu­nately, Indian government’s actions and their words con­tra­dict each other. They keep say­ing they are for peace but they keep prepar­ing for war. So obvi­ously, since Pak­istan has a pol­icy of tit-for-tat, you have to keep a min­i­mum deter­rence in place to avoid an out­right war. Is it fair? No, it’s not. But then, that’s life.