[Reader-list] Kamila Shamsie on India,Pakistan and Lies

[abir bazaz]

Kamila Shamsie
Thursday January 3, 2002
The Guardian

A decade ago, more than 50 of my 96 classmates and I left Karachi to attend university in the US and UK. We didn't give much thought to the fact thatmany of us would be meeting Indians for the first time in our lives. It's hard now to find anyone among those 50-odd Pakistanis who didn't make at least one Indian friend. But what we all discovered was this: we might agree
with our friends from across the border on everything else - our embarrassed attachment to 80s music; our despair at the floundering fortunes of the West
Indian cricket team; our inability to eat Uncle Ben's rice without thinking weepily of basmati; our positions on capital punishment, gay rights,abortion, and gun control - but we could not agree, not one whit, on the twointerrelated wounds of Indo-Pak relations: partition and Kashmir.

There are worse things, I suppose, than discovering at 18 that, no matter how many books you read and analytical skills you acquire, your truths will
never be objective.

It would be nice to say that, after a decade of talk, those Indo-Pak friendships have resulted in a shifting of positions which can serve as an example to the politicians of our two countries. Perhaps this is true in one or two cases. But, largely, we just learned to stop talking about certain things to each other, and accepted that we had grown up with two different narratives about the same events.

If the "two nations, two narratives" issue only centred on the creation of Pakistan 55 years ago, I expect we could learn to live with our differences.But as long as the situation in Kashmir remains unresolved we will continue to see border tensions and doomsday predictions and radically differing interpretations arising from a basic set of facts.

The basic set of facts we are faced with is this: on December 13 there was a failed attack on the Indian parliament, and the attackers were killed along
with several Indian security personnel.

One narrative surrounding these ba
ed how easy it is to milk the "no distinction between terrorists and those who harbour them" line, gunmen miraculously got through security checks, in a time of heightened alerts, and attempted to destroy the Indian parliament. In a further miracle, none of the ministerswere hurt and the terrorists were killed. The Indian government refused to show the faces of the terrorists to reporters, insisted that the terrorists were part of two groups fighting for the liberation of Kashmir (though that is not quite how
the Indians phrased it), and that the attack was planned in training camps in Pakistan and involved the collusion of Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI. Pakistan offered a joint inquiry into the affair, and India
refused.

The other narrative, in which I'm not as well-versed, follows these lines: Pakistan decided to take advantage of its newly warmed friendship with the world's superpower by launching yet another in a long series of attacks on India. Pakistan-sponsored terrorist groups attempted to bring the Indian government to its knees by blowing up the Indian parliament. The plan was
foiled and the terrorists were killed. If the war against terrorism is to be a global war then surely India must have the right to attack Pakistan. But
the US cautioned restraint, and Pakistan, in a brazenly cheeky move, insisted that it be part of the investigation into the attack.

Or, here is the condensed version of the two narratives, which can stand in for the two narratives during any conflict between India and Pakistan.

Narrative one: India always lies.

Narrative two: Pakistan always lies.

But there is an important third narrative. In the first days after President Musharraf came to power in Pakistan more than two years ago, he repeatedly expressed his admiration for the aggressively secular Kemal Ataturk. Andthen, abruptly, he went silent. It was widely believed that Musharraf was warned against the perils of taking on the hardline religious groups. But in
a post-September 11 Pakistan the extr
 up significant support for their anti-government rallies, and the president has been speaking openly about the need to combat those who have been holding hostage a nation which is essentially moderate.

Pakistan's best chance to move against the extremists is now. But it's one thing for Musharraf to root out terrorists; it's quite another for him to appear to do so at the behest of India. In government circles, it is being said that Musharraf is furious about the attacks on the parliament building,and - more importantly - that India's belligerent demands that he arrest militants are actually slowing down the crackdown on extremists. Perhaps this is the narrative to which more Indians should be paying attention.

For a moment I thought I could end this column on that previous line. But to do so would be to leave out the most important narrative here: that of the 70,000 and more (every week, more) who have died since 1990 in the struggle for Kashmir's future. When Indo-Pak narratives clash, the fallout is almost always in Kashmir. India insists there is no genuine struggle for self-determination and that the uprising in Kashmir is Pakistan-sponsored.Pakistan insists it offers only moral support to the Kashmiri struggle.

India lies.

Pakistan lies.

But here is a truth we can all agree on: a solution to the Kashmir dispute must be found so that the phrase "threat of nuclear war" can be consigned to
the history books and the next generation of Pakistanis and Indians does not become so accustomed to such a phrase that, in the midst of the massive build-up of troops along the border, it continues to live its life as though nothing out of the ordinary is going on. (I don't know about the major cities of India, but in Karachi New Year was a wildly celebratory affair,
and not just among groups who are associated with fiddling during fires.)

And here is another, no less important truth: a solution must be found for the sake of the Kashmiris who have waited far too long already to approve a joint narrative 
Bloomsbury, £6.99)