Elections have been held in Pakistan and are to take place in India later this year. But the chance of new agreements between the two archrivals, such as on the Kashmir issue, remains small – Photo BBC
How Can You Build Greater Understanding between Two Nations if Their Inhabitants Never Meet?
By Rob Vreeken
Istanbul, Turkey
Beena Sarwar on the phone: she is about to fly from her current hometown of Boston to her homeland Pakistan to vote. Parliamentary elections will take place there on Thursday, February 8.
I have known Beena for a long time. More than thirty years ago, she spent a week in the editorial office of Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant, where I was a foreign desk reporter. She was one of four young female journalists from South Asia who made a study trip to become acquainted with the Dutch media. Even then she stood out: just a little smarter, more eager and more interested than the others.
In 1997 I visited her in Pakistan, where I was covering the elections. She had just given birth to her daughter Maha; my baby gift was well received. We kept in touch, she wrote something for de Volkskrant a few times and from a distance I saw how she developed into a reporter and columnist for Pakistani media, filmmaker, blogger and later also a journalism teacher in the US.
Two red lines were always visible in Beena's work: human rights and peace in South Asia, especially between India and Pakistan. She committed herself to this with the passion of a journalist as well as an activist.
The most recent manifestation of this is Sapan News, a supplier of news, columns and analysis about South Asia. It stems from another initiative in which Beena also played a prominent role, the Southasia Peace Action Network (Sapan), which was founded three years ago. The aim is to establish connections between citizens of the countries in South Asia. If the leaders cannot or do not want to get closer to each other, then ordinary people will have to do it.
To begin with, this requires something very practical, which is therefore at the top of Sapan's wish list: visas. The network strives for a visa-free South Asia, or a confederation of countries with 'soft borders'. At the moment this is not the case. It is virtually impossible for Pakistanis to get a visa for India and vice versa. How can you build greater understanding between two nations if the people who live there never meet? There was literally one railway line between New Delhi and Lahore, the Samjhauta Express (Accord Express Train), but it was shut down in 2019 due to a conflict between the two governments.
The sour relations date back to the founding of both countries in 1947. With a big bang, British India was divided into a Muslim country and a Hindu majority country. A chaotic population swap killed an estimated one million people and two months after independence the first war broke out over Kashmir. Two more wars for the region would follow, in 1965 and 1999. In between, in 1971, the Indian army helped the freedom fighters of Bangladesh break away from Pakistan.
This century, India was the scene of several major terrorist attacks with a Pakistani signature, the two countries competed against each other in developing nuclear weapons and the mutual shelling across the Kashmir line has become so routine that they do not even make the news.
It has been ten years since the leaders of the two neighboring countries spoke. These were Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif.
The latter is a veteran. From 1990 onwards, he was prime minister three times and was deposed just as many times by the army or by the Supreme Court, on charges of corruption, abuse of power and even attempted murder (of army leader Pervez Musharraf). He was sentenced to life in prison and spent more than ten years in exile.
Sharif is the comeback kid of Pakistani politics. He will take part in the elections again on Thursday, together with his brother Shehbaz, who was also prime minister (2022-2023). There is a good chance that their Pakistan Muslim League will win the elections and that one of the brothers will become prime minister (again). No, the concept of 'new leadership', so much in vogue in the Netherlands, never took root in Pakistan.
India will also go to the polls soon. A new parliament will be elected in April and May. Those elections will undoubtedly be won by the BJP, the Hindu nationalist party of incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
As far as the relationship between India and Pakistan is concerned, the motto in the coming years seems to be: more of the same. And that wasn't much to begin with. When Modi and Sharif met in 2014, they spoke warm words, but no real agreements ever came about. That would certainly have been difficult for Sharif. Any Pakistani leader who makes real concessions on the Kashmir issue would be committing political suicide. After all, the army leadership would never allow something like that.
So again, little can be expected from governments. “They behave like kids,” says Beena Sarwar. "But their arguments affect the entire family."
Her Sapan News writes about a play in which India's father of the country, Mahatma Gandhi, and the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, ultimately fall for each other. Fiction, then, in Gandhi and Jinnah Return Home , things do end well between India and Pakistan. Nice, such a performance. In New Delhi? Lahore? Oops, no: in Washington.
(Rob Vreeken is the Istanbul correspondent for the Dutch daily newspaper De Volkskrant. He is the author of three books: ‘Bombay hyperstad’ (2006, about life in the Indian mega city), ‘Baas in eigen boerka’ (2010, about women in the Islamic world) and ‘Een heidens karwei’ (2023, about the failed Islamization of Turkey under President Tayyip Erdogan. Sapna News).
