Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay | Making Friends: Let’s Woo The People Of South Asia

In the summer of 1996, shortly after the BJP emerged as the single-largest party in the Lok Sabha and Atal Behari Vajpayee led his party to gain control over the strings of power in India, albeit for barely a fortnight, the late Pakistani poet Fahmida Riaz’s words appeared a tad over-reactive. She had apparently, spontaneously, penned down the lines of the deeply perceptive poem Tum bilkul hum jaise nikle (You turned out to be just like us). The “words came flying by”, she told an Indian reporter, after a conversation with a few Indian friends in Canada (not a frowned-upon destination on this side of the international border back then) when they spoke about the increasingly communal milieu in India. Ms Riaz was no stranger to India. She had lived in exile here in the 1980s, during Gen. Zia-ul Haq’s tenure, a period when religion started becoming an increasing factor in politics and elections in India too.

Yet, in 1996, it appeared that she had wrongly called out India for following in Pakistan’s footsteps. After all, the BJP may have emerged as the largest party and secured a short stint in power, but it reached this position only after Hindutva icon Lal Krishna Advani made way for the more acceptable and genial Mr Vajpayee. Ms Riaz’s opening lines, pronouncing an unambiguous verdict on India, certainly looked as if she pressed a false alarm. She mocked Indians for turning out just like them, steeped in religious bigotry like Pakistanis, and asked where we Indians (or at least the pro-Hindutva lot) had been hiding. She confessed knowing what Indians were engaged in, because that is what her fellow citizens had been promoting -- a reference to the two-nation theory.

Hostility between India and Pakistan was something that every Indian born in, or after 1947, grew up with. Yet, enmity was essentially state to state. As far as people-to-people ties were concerned, they bonded on basis of shared culture and heritage, especially if it involved those living in northern or eastern India. Even Ms Riaz, in the years she lived in Delhi in exile, was facilitated by iconic Indian multi-genre writer Amrita Pritam and was nominated as poet-in-residence in Jamia Millia Islamia and no one protested or pilloried her, asking if she agreed with raison d’être of Pakistan; the poet was treated like an individual targeted by the Pakistani State, with sympathy and respect. My parents in Iraq in late 1970s and early 1980s, in the years before the war with Iran began, had a Pakistani couple as friends in the university campus they lived in. They wrote to me about their evenings spent learning and sharing each other’s music and so on. People-to-people ties were facilitated by even the likes of Mr Vajpayee, who never hid being a fan of Noor Jehan or Mehdi Hasan’s singing. Indian political leaders like Inder Kumar Gujral grew nostalgic while speaking about the “home” and college left behind. During the bilateral summit meeting with Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif in the Maldives in 1997, where they agreed on eight issues to be taken up in the “composite dialogue” process, cooks were flown in from Lahore. Culture and politics remained two distinct territories even after sporting ties were affected by war or hostilities triggered by India’s deteriorating internal security on account of cross-border terrorism. This engagement between the people of the two countries was seen as an avenue to bridge the gulf between the nations and make the respective governments decide to smoke the peace pipe and live amicably.

These thoughts ricochetted through the mind amid hostile vilification of Punjabi singer-actor Diljit Dosanjh over the film Sardaar Ji 3, featuring a cross-border cast which has been shattering box office records abroad and even in Pakistan, where unlike in India, the film was released on schedule. This was the second film after Abir Gulaal, another with a cast drawn from both countries that has been stalled in India. There have been two kinds of responses to the decisions of the producers of these films. One lot targeted mainly Mr Dosanjh and not Vaani Kapoor, the lead Indian female actor in the other film, who “fell in line” and removed all posts about Abir Gulal and her co-star, Pakistani actor Fawad Khan. One particular section of the Indian film community, which clearly sees benefits in lining up with the current political establishment in India, has gone to the extent of demanding that producers should stop working with one of India’s most popular music and film icons. It hasn’t been factored while hurling accusations against Mr Dosanjh and making these demands that the film was shot well before the terrorist strike in Pahalgam. But amid the fallout of the controversy, it has been evident that industry scores against a “rival” or a person of “greater” star value have been settled in the garb of nationalism. Thankfully, the BJP’s sober response has not led to escalation of the campaign against any of the stars.

This is a difficult time for Indian diplomacy and India’s isolation in the world, in South Asia especially, is alarmingly high. The problem in the neighbourhood greatly stems from the fact that the government, since 2014, has crafted its foreign policy and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s engagements with an eye on harnessing the ruling party’s electoral constituency. The BJP’s electoral consolidation continues regardless of the government’s deliveries and performance, chiefly by advocating Hindu majoritarian politics. Not just cutting down on people-to-people ties, but also by targeting Indians who maintain any form of contact with Pakistani (or other South Asian nations like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal) achievers or public personalities, is seen as a way to consolidating the Hindutva support base. Recall how Neeraj Chopra was targeted for inviting Arshad Nadeem, the javelin thrower from Pakistan, Chopra’s great friend and arch-rival. This however, should not be the time when the government and ruling party should look solely at its electoral balance sheet. The people of India’s neighbouring nations must not be looked at as rivals and equated with the state or government of those countries. Instead, they should be considered as bulwarks against their governments pursuing policies and lend support to forces that endanger India and its people. In the excessively charged-up situation in South Asia, making friends should be the Indian government’s priority. By casting all citizens of countries seen as hostile as “enemies”, India loses propping forces that disagree with their governments and want improvement in ties with India and stop supporting forces that endanger India’s internal national security.

Author-journalist Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay’s latest book is The Demolition, The Verdict and The Temple: The Definitive Book on the Ram Mandir Project. He is also the author of Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times. He tweets at @NilanjanUdwin