INDIA-PAKISTAN: People Want To Scale Walls of Hatred
By Rita Manchanda
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Nov 27 (IPS) - Only two weeks after their
governments had concluded futile talks to break the deadlock between India and Pakistan, the people of both countries, at a meeting in this frontier town, resolved to find a way out.
The 'Fourth Joint Convention of the Pak-India Forum for Peace and
Democracy' concluded on Monday in Peshawar, near the Afghanistan border,
with some 300-odd delegates renewing pledges to scale the walls of
hatred between their countries.
Since the idea was first floated in Lahore in 1995, the Forum has
provided an opportunity for people in both countries to meet and discuss
their common problems.
It has built a network of peoples and organisations - environmentalists,
women's groups, trade unionists, human rights activists, peace
activists, academics and professionals - committed to cross border peace
and democracy.
With dogmatic and conservative forces in both countries feeding off each
other and pushing the neighbours into tit-for- tat nuclear tests -
sparking off a nuclear arms race - the Forum's role as peacebuilder is
vital, members feel.
Pakistan's leading rights campaigner I.A. Rehman who is co- chair of the
Forum said the ''task of the Pakistan chapter lies in (controlling)
Pakistan and that of the Indian chapter in India.''
Peshawar could not have been a more appropriate venue for the first
meeting of people from the two countries after the May nuclear
muscle-flexing.
In the years before martial law, a strong tradition of secularism had
existed here. Its Independence leader Khan Abdul Gafoor Khan was very
close to Mahatma Gandhi and was in fact revered as the ''Frontier
Gandhi'' for his non-violent and secular politics.
One of his followers, Member of Parliament Latif Afridi who represents
the tribal Khyber Agency and rarely gets heard in a parliament dominated
by Sind and Punjab lawmakers, welcomed the Forum's members to Peshawar.
Most of the 160 Indian delegates had crossed by foot into Pakistan
through the Wagah border, in Punjab province, and travelled by bus to
Peshawar with permission from the Pakistani authorities.
For some among them, it was a sentimental journey. Brij Mohan Toofan,
78, rushed to Kissa Kahani - the market place of story tellers - to don
a 'pishori' turban as he and his father had worn before Partition, when
Peshawar had been their home.
Both countries are bound by a shared history. A journey to the Peshawar
valley, brought alive the common heritage of the Gandhara-Buddhist
culture. The emphasis was on the common historical linkage with Central
Asia, a political counterpoint to contemporary Pakistan's attempt to
forge an Arab identity.
Viewing the past against the present - the busy rewriting of history
texts by Hindu fundamentalists and the political Islamist nationalist
agenda of Pakistan's government - delegates from both sides denounced
the deliberate distortions which inculcated intolerance.
A teacher in Peshawar, a Pathan, expressed concern at the way
misinformation about Indian Hindus treating Muslims in that country as
untouchables spawned religious hatred here.
A school teacher from Ahmedabad in the western Indian state of Gujarat,
which is ruled by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), said
state schools had dropped the chapters on the rise of Islam and
Christianity from world history syllabus. In Pakistan, history texts in
schools begin with the coming of Islam to India, ignoring the region's
pre-Islamic history.
Earlier the Forum's Delhi and Lahore conventions had shown the courage
to take a common position on bitterly disputed Kashmir, to reject the
stand that it was a mere territorial fight.
In Peshawar, there was a strengthened appeal for a democratic and non
insurgent solution which is acceptable to peoples living on both sides
of the ''line of control'', as the border is called.
An impassioned plea about the sufferings of the people of Kashmir by Ved
Bhasin, editor of 'Kashmir Times' published from Jammu, cut through the
cliche of Kashmir being only a territorial dispute and the proxy war.
As a result the Forum demanded that the Indian government pull back its
troops from civilian areas and that the Pakistan government make a
determined effort to stop the armed activities
of the militants. This must be done, it said, to make international
mediation unnecessary.
The Forum urged the two governments to sign a peace treaty, even though
governments on both sides have shown an inability to rise above
competitive posturing on their inflexible positions on Kashmir.
As Dr Mubashir Hasan, a former Pakistan finance minister, said: ''One
reason we have not progressed is because we have not talked to the
Kashmiris.''
The mutually self destructive adversarial relationship between India and
Pakistan makes even less sense when weighed against the gains from
cooperation, particularly in trade as the president of the Sarhand
Chamber of Commerce volubly expanded on volubly.
Although studies commissioned by the Pakistan government have
recommended that the benefits of opening up trade far outweigh its
disadvantages, Pakistan has held back from granting india ''most
favoured nation'' status.
Development of a region in which 40 percent of the population live in
poverty has become hostage to progress on bilateral disputes between
India and Pakistan, made more intractable by their nuclear positions.
As Rehman, the Forum co-chair asserted: ''Neither of us can afford it
(rivalry). We in Pakistan certainly can't. It will bring democracy under
pressure, further" (END/IPS/rm/an/98)
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