{"id":4949,"date":"2016-10-02T20:14:06","date_gmt":"2016-10-02T14:44:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/calamur.org\/gargi\/?p=4949"},"modified":"2016-10-02T20:14:06","modified_gmt":"2016-10-02T14:44:06","slug":"india-and-pakistan-time-to-forget-we-were-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calamur.org\/gargi\/2016\/10\/02\/india-and-pakistan-time-to-forget-we-were-one\/","title":{"rendered":"India and Pakistan — time to forget we were one."},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was growing up, I was often told, by my father’s friends – India and Pakistan, we are brothers. we have the same language, culture, etc etc etc. \u00a0This was when we lived in Delhi. i later realised that the fact that the dominant culture in Delhi was Punjabi, and there was a yearning for the age gone by.\u00a0As i grew older, and began understanding the concept of diversity, i began understanding only one thing – that while there are some Indians who are like the Pakistanis – primarily Sindhis and Punjabis – most of us are not.<\/p>\n

As I got even older, i understood more. As a student in England, i had a Pakistani classmate, who was from Karachi. He told me that he was a Mohajir<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>and that his family supported this party called MQM. That they were fighting for Mohajir<\/em> rights. Mohajir<\/em> was a term used to describe immigrants from India. And, i found that kind of odd- that Mohajirs would be discriminated against- given that Pakistan was set up as a Muslim homeland. Then came other surprises. This was an era before cell phones. Even land lines in India were sparse. And i would call up on a given day to India – to my dad’s office to chat. or he would call me. All my classmates knew that habit. That day, dad’s office was shut for Muharram<\/strong> <\/a>. My Pakistani classmate did not know what Muharram was. I was kind of surprised, because he was a Muslim, and this was a Muslim religious day. Which is when I also figured that all Muslims do not live together in harmony. And, there are some countries in which Shias are discriminated against. From my Bangladeshi neighbours and classmates, i learned first hand accounts of the massacre in Dacca before the 1971 war. And it was based less on religion, and more on the ethnicity, linguistics, and just the desire to kill the ‘other’ – you can define ‘other’ whichever way you want, it is just someone who is not like you.<\/p>\n

And, then the 1993 bomb blasts took place in India. Planned in Pakistan. Executed in Mumbai. The start of a long list of terror attacks, against civilians in India. It continues till today.\\\"3345244882_391ccd20d7_z\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The overlapping era, across the world, was the era of sanctions against South Africa for practising apartheid. The best cricket players, the best actors, the best rugby players, never played internationally because their government was bigoted, and their system perpetuated it. I never understood why Pakistan never faced sanctions. What it has done since inception has been on par with what Nazi Germany perpetuated. Yet, it got away free.<\/p>\n

Pakistan has had some of the best publicity and public relations management in the history of nations.It got away, literally, with murder, rape\u00a0and massacres.\u00a0Even when it committed \u00a0genocide in East Pakistan<\/a>, <\/strong>there were no sanctions. I have heard first hand accounts of the genocide, and, much of what we read \u00a0has been so sanitised, that people who speak about it come across as nutcases. The men who planned it, those who implemented it, walked away scot free. The actions against the Bengali speaking population of East Pakistan was just something that they got caught doing. There is a list of things that are so under the radar, they rarely\u00a0get mentioned. Genocide against every conceivable minority<\/strong><\/a> possible – Shia Muslims<\/strong><\/a>, Ahmedias\u00a0<\/a>, Christians<\/a>, Hindus<\/a>, the Baloch People<\/a>, Hazaras<\/a>,\u00a0<\/strong>just to mention a few. These are stories i routinely come across when i trawl the interwebs for reading. There are a lot more i never come across, because a) they aren’t on the internet, b) they are on the internet but i don’t read the language. Pakistan has gotten away with sheer murder, time and time again. And, the naive west, led by the USA, has fallen time and time again for a pack of lies, told by a bunch of sociopaths, who claim to be the last defence against Islamist terror. This is like the west paying the mother lode of terror to get it to fight terror.<\/p>\n

I always wondered why South Africa faced sanctions, and Pakistan did not. As i got even older i got the answer to it. The Afrikaners, were terrible on television. They looked arrogant, didn’t look terribly telegenic, spoke like Nazis, and came across as\u00a0terribly racist. On the other hand, Pakistan had invested in people who are\u00a0suave, sophisticated, look telegenic and sounded like they were possibly your best friends. If you take away all your biases against Pakistan, and listen to their generals and bureaucrats on television. If you heard them day after day, you will be convinced that they are the victims of circumstance. That India is the aggressor. That they are the last defence against terror. Someone as canny as Nixon was taken in by the sophistication<\/p>\n

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I have often written about why I never understood successive Governments of India falling for the Pakistani line of ‘let us be friends’ – maybe, as a woman<\/strong><\/a> i believe that before friendship, there needs to be trust. there needs to be that sense of security. And, i have often wondered, why we don’t stop<\/strong><\/a> trading, transacting, communicating. The nostalgia of one Indian state, cannot become the cross for the rest of India to bear.<\/p>\n

Last week, before the surgical strikes<\/strong><\/a> against terror camps on the other side of the LoC (btw – India did not violate Pakistan’s territorial rights, it walked into a part of India illegally occupied by Pakistan) , and after the Uri attacks, there was this entire clamour about banning Pakistani actors on film. I have no views on this, except that why would you hire outsiders, to do jobs that locals can do. But, Bollywood has always been kind of woolly headed about Pakistan. It stems from the fact that too many people from Bollywood come from Punjab. And most Punjabis are, understandably, nostalgic about undivided Punjab. As a south indian brought up in Maharashtra, this entire ‘we are one people’ ‘we have the same language and culture and food’ never made sense, because we didn’t. But, this is less about the myopia and nostalgia of Bollywood, and more about the fact that on a daily basis, representatives of the Pakistani establishment are entering your homes, via your TV sets, to give you their side of the story. I ran a poll on this, on twitter, to gauge the response of others. A<\/p>\n

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Should Former Pak Bureaucrats, Diplomats, Armed Forces, Politicians PM’s be on Indian news channels putting across a Pak PoV? #poll<\/a> #RT<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Harini Calamur (@calamur) September 28, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n