The country we don't know about

Indians have little knowledge about Pakistan and this ignorance has bred hatred

I enjoyed our win against Pakistan on Sunday at Edgbaston. But no more than I do our wins against other sides. And, if we were to have lost to them, I would have been (momentarily) as upset as I might have been in losing to any other team. 

I don’t hate Pakistan. I don’t even dislike it. This makes me and people like me unusual in our nation where hatred is what most feel. But this is blind hatred, meaning it’s not based on any knowledge of Pakistan. Government data says about 5 per cent of Indians have a passport. Given how difficult it is for us to get a visa for Pakistan, and how difficult it is for them to get one for India, not even 1 per cent (my guess is 0.001 per cent) of us have been to Pakistan. And so the emotion most feel for it is based on what the media says about it. That is to say, Pakistan is a terrorist state and all the rest of it. The saying is that contempt is bred by familiarity. In the instance of India and Pakistan it is ignorance that has bred hatred. 

When I first went to Pakistan, about a couple of decades or so ago, it was easier for people from both nations to cross. Certainly it was easier to get a visa. Not that the terror thing was any different at that point. It was in fact more. Twenty years ago, violence in Kashmir was claiming 10 times the number of lives (2,900 people in 1996) than it is today (267 people in 2016). So if anything, Pakistani mischief (assuming, as most Indians, including the great man running this country do, that all violence in Kashmir is the doing of Pakistanis) has long been in decline. But what we didn’t have then is the brave men and women of television, going off to fake battle daily, and amplifying the problem. 

Anyway, in those days, at a party in my Bandra flat where I would introduce someone as being from Karachi or Lahore, the response from the Indian would be mild interest or disinterest. No more than it would be if they were shaking hands with someone from Sudan or New Zealand. The converse, however, was not the same and fellow columnist Shekhar Gupta, another frequent visitor to Pakistan, will vouch for that. Indians are stars in Pakistan, just for the fact of being Indian. Many of the stories about people refusing money, including rickshaw drivers and paanwallahs are true. 

In March 2004, I was in Multan to watch Sehwag hit an exhilarating triple hundred against a side with Shoaib Akhtar and Mohd Sami. At one point I was identified as being Indian, and strangers came to me for an autograph, those being pre-selfie days, for no achievement or fame other than being Indian. I don’t think it’s very different now. 

I have long felt that Pakistan has missed a trick in public relations by not letting Indian tourists in freely, in fact without visas, a relationship like we have with Nepal. In reality, Pakistan makes it exactly as difficult for us to visit as we make it for them. I would say to their policymakers that we had something to fear in letting Pakistanis in because of their terrorists, and no Indian government would be brave enough to open our borders to the west. However Pakistan didn’t have the same problem (though now with the Jadhav thing it may no longer be easy to make that argument). The more Indians that actually personally experienced their country, I said, the easier it would be for them to change our image of them. Unfortunately, they insisted on the stupidity of reciprocity. And now, with this government in India, it is not going to be change anytime soon.

Am I innocent of the fact that the Pakistani state has bred and trained and unleashed jihadis on us? Of course not. That is a matter of fact. But I am capable, as most Indians no longer are, of nuance on the matter. I know that since 9/11, the blowback has visited great cruelty on Pakistan. Over 60,000 Pakistani lives have been lost, to the same ideology used against India, many times more than India has lost in all separatist violence in this period. 

Illustration by Binay Sinha

And I also know that there are many Pakistanis who disagree with, and in fact hate, their army and their government for doing what it did and, even if to a lesser extent, continues to do. Since I have been a journalist, I can also observe the fact that Pakistani journalists have been more independent and questioning of their state’s misbehaviour than we have been of ours. Goebbels couldn’t have fashioned from whole cloth the sort of mindless nationalistic messaging that we nightly put out. Of course they have their media nutters, too, but they also have the intelligent questioning and speaking of truth to power that our media has abandoned more or less completely, and shamefully.

I should clarify here towards the end that I have travelled to be where I am. In my 20s I would not have watched an India-Pakistan match live. It would have been too much emotion and anxiety for me to contain with comfort. I and many of my generation were traumatised by that last ball in Sharjah and losing to them again would be very painful and the emotion felt would not be momentary. 

Having seen Pakistan and studied it and known many Pakistanis, I am much more relaxed now about these things. They are just another of our neighbours and ultimately just one of 200 countries. I have no problem watching us play them, and I will enjoy watching future matches — as long as we win, of course.