WHY PAKISTAN IS IMPORTANT
When the neighbor is friendly, our confidence is high and the cost of fencing low, which is the great advantage enjoyed by, for example, the North American neighbors, the U.S. and Canada. For countries in South Asia, on the other hand, although on paper there’s a body called SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation), fencing costs are extremely high. The persistence, well known to the world, with which India and Pakistan needle each other is sheer folly.
Which is why I was delighted that finally, after a long gap, the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan shook hands in Islamabad on October 16 and may even have exchanged pleasantries. This “miracle” occurred on the sidelines of a Pakistan-hosted conference of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. (Headquartered in Beijing, SCO was founded in 2001 by China and Russia as a regional body of Eurasian countries. In more recent years, India, Pakistan, and Iran have joined as full members.)
My friend Manishankar Aiyar, a former cabinet minister in India in a Congress government, and prior to that a diplomat posted in Karachi, goes beyond this and thinks that some kind of thaw might be in the offing. I am not so sure. Nonetheless Aiyar, otherwise an unrelenting critic of the Modi government and its philosophy, has used strongly complimentary words for foreign minister S. Jaishankar’s brief and careful remarks during his two-day visit to Pakistan.
For me, the mere fact that Jaishankar visited Pakistan and shook hands with his counterpart there (and also, it seems, with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif) was a positive. Citing Jaishankar’s “entourage” but no individual in particular, Aiyar on his part suggests that at the Islamabad encounter “the atmospherics were good.”
EASILY BRUSHED ASIDE
Let me use the October 16 “encounter” to emphasize, for viewers of this site, the importance of Pakistan, a country that some too easily brush aside as a failure in economic or nation-building terms, or simplistically scorn as “a facilitator of terrorism.” Many in the world are simply unaware of Pakistan’s size, its geographical location, the youthfulness of its immense population (currently over 250 million), the extent and contents of its connections with the U.S., China, Russia, and the U.K., the strength of Pakistan’s links with Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E. – and the intellectual and creative capacities of the Pakistani people.
As I see it, a compelling example of Pakistani abilities is the English-language daily Dawn, which can be easily accessed and studied at dawn.com.
Dawn’s print edition started its life in Delhi in 1941, under the auspices of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, president of the All-India Muslim League and future founder of Pakistan. Those like me who spent their early years in the Delhi of the 1940s can clearly remember Dawn’s office and press in Daryaganj. On Pakistan’s inception in 1947, the newspaper moved to the new country’s capital at the time, the great port city of Karachi, which remains the capital today of Sindh province.
I am hardly familiar with the radio and TV channels that Dawn’s publishers also bring out, but of the online Dawn I can say with confidence that it is one of South Asia’s quality newspapers. On October 16, for instance, it published a lengthy pictorial piece on an exhibition in Delhi about Hindu and Sikh refugees in India. The large-type introduction declares:
“Sindhis have been missing in India’s Partition story. Now they finally get an exhibition. The Partition Museum in Delhi now pays tribute to the unacknowledged pain of Sindhis, blending oral histories, archival material, memory artefacts, and contemporary art from a scattered culture.”
https://images.dawn.com/news/1192854
This was not, to be fair, a report that Dawn had put together on its own. It was in fact a reproduction, by arrangement, of a piece written for the Indian portal The Print by senior journalist Rama Lakshmi. Which in a way makes Dawn’s initiative with the report even more interesting, for clearly the Karachi newspaper had no problem informing Pakistani readers of its collaboration with an Indian outlet.
EMPATHY COMES ACROSS
Anyone looking at the report and its pictures will sense the empathy. I certainly feel good knowing that in and from Karachi there is praise today for an exhibition in New Delhi about Hindu and Sikh Sindhis who in 1947 felt obliged to uproot themselves from Sindh.
I should explain the phrase “Hindu and Sikh Sindhis.” Many Hindu Sindhis (who, like the vastly more numerous Muslim Sindhis, speak the Sindhi language) would be puzzled if asked whether by religion they were Hindu or Sikh. Even if their males do not keep their hair long or use a turban, many families of Hindu Sindhis are devout followers of Guru Nanak, the founding Guru of the Sikhs.
Although a great many Hindus left Sindh for India in 1947, and it is their absolutely remarkable story that the exhibition in New Delhi tries to capture, a considerable number did not. Out of a total population today of around 58 million, Sindh province may contain around 5 million or more Hindus, a solid figure that sometimes shocks Hindus in India and Muslims outside Sindh in Pakistan. In fact in one district in Sindh province, Umerkot (where Akbar the emperor was born in 1542) Hindus today form a majority.
INVISIBLE SINDHI MUSLIMS
What about Sindh’s Muslims? A most intriguing reality is this. While Hindu Sindhis can be found everywhere in the world, from Indonesia to the Caribbean and from Brazil to Hong Kong, Muslim Sindhis, who are about 15 percent of Pakistan’s population, are much harder to run into. This is true even in Karachi, their capital. Here is what a 2013 Dawn article by Tahir Mehdi said:
“According to past census, half of Karachi's 8.9 million population had Urdu as its mother tongue, another quarter was made up of speakers of Pashtu and Punjabi while Sindhis were just five per cent of the population of the capital of Sindh, and half of them lived in the suburban area of Malir. On the other hand, Karachi had more Pashtuns than Peshawar, the capital of Pakhtunkhwa!”
Added Mehdi: “In Lahore, you will find a Pashtun enterprise at every corner and even a Sikh cloth merchant but never a Sindhi businessman. The Pakistani labour working in Middle East is almost exclusively Punjabi and Pashtun.”
https://www.dawn.com/news/1036021
During the several short visits I have made to Pakistan, I indeed met a few Muslim Sindhis (in Karachi and in Islamabad). Yet the (not so many) Pakistani Sindhis I have run into during my numerous years in the U.S. were usually Hindu rather than Muslim. Why Sindhi Muslims, whose presence in Pakistan is only a little smaller than that of Pashtun Muslims, are almost invisible outside Pakistan, in fact outside Sindh, whereas Pashtuns -- and Sindhi Hindus -- are noticeable almost everywhere on the globe, is only one of the many interesting questions that can be asked about the inhabitants of South Asia.
INTENTIONAL CONVERSATIONS
The doors closed against Imran Khan, religious extremism, the Sunni-Shia divide, sectarianism within the Sunni or the Shia world, terrorism, the movement for Baloch separatism, the military’s itch to interfere with politics, the difficult relationship with Afghanistan – these problems and more afflict Pakistan. But I cannot help feeling that a key for strengthening nationhood in Pakistan lies in a greater intentional dialogue among different Pakistanis. If only Punjabis, Pashtuns, Sindhis, the Baloch, and the millions whose grandparents or parents moved from India to Pakistan, most of whom speak Urdu or Hindustani at home, can get to know one another better!
In his 2013 article Mehdi frankly confessed that “all the Sindhis I knew could be counted on the fingers of one hand.” He was revealing a key South Asian reality: our ignorance about immediate neighbours, whether inside or outside national boundaries. When Pakistanis listen to one another and read about one another, when Indians really get to know one another, when South Asians of different kinds have intentional conversations among themselves, that’s when things may change. Is it very hard to start this process? Even in lands outside South Asia where Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Indians, Sri Lankans, and Nepalis of any religion can meet one another without needing a visa?
