An Indian diplomat invited his parents to visit him in Pakistan. One of his fathers cousins, who happened to be present, was horrified at the suggestion. Yenna, da, he asked my friend, is it a teerthastahanam (holy place) that you are inviting them there at their age? Everyone had a hearty laugh and his parents went anyway.
But I dont think the man was joking. He was, like hundreds of millions of other Indians, dead serious in his dislike of Pakistan. There are millions of Pakistanis who feel the same way about India.
I dont know why the Pakistanis dislike India. Nor do I care much. But I do know why many intelligent and educated Indians dislike Pakistan: they detest the very idea of Pakistan. After all, it represents the entirely offensive notion that Muslims and their interests would not be safe in India after the British left.
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But set that can of worms aside for a moment. Look, instead, only at the foreign affairs side of things. From 1952 onwards the US, which now wants to make peace between India and Pakistan, has not just equated Pakistan with India, it has also armed it.
The result has been that Pakistan has felt able to provoke two wars with India. But though it lost the third one decisively in 1971, it has carried on a low-level war, first in Punjab in the 1980s and then in Kashmir in the first half of the 1990s.
The Punjab intervention had the blessings of the US as long as the Soviets were in Afghanistan. The reason was simple: insurgency in Punjab helped secure Pakistans eastern flank while the Afghan war was on. This was Zias reward for allowing Pakistan to be a conduit for US weapons to Afghan rebels.
But then, in the mid-1980s, Pakistan said it had developed nuclear weapons and this frightened the US. It began to believe that India and Pakistan would start off a nuclear war against each other.
So now it has turned honest broker and is bringing enormous pressure to bear on both countries to sit down and talk to each other. The pressure is more on Pakistan than on India, which has always been willing to talk.
Benazir Bhutto, for domestic political reasons, could not afford to give in to the pressure and was eventually forced out by the Americans, acting through the Army. Nawaz Sharif, who too suffered a similar fate in 1993, has got the message, whence the current round of talks.
For India, meanwhile, the central problem is of deciphering to whom it is talking: the civilian government, the army or the US? Obviously, what it talks about and how will depend on who it thinks it is talking to.
Each of these three players has a different agenda. Often, the items on these agendas pull in different directions. Then there is the joker in the pack, the ISI, which is the fourth player and which is under nobodys control. It is capable of great mischief.
The fresh round of Indo-Pak talks now in progress need to be viewed in this general perspective as also in the realisation that, if nothing else, they will make a hyperventilating US feel better.
Arguably, that alone may be worth the effort that goes into generating the false bonhomie on these occasions.