Going to Pakistan 

Islamabad/Kolkata: Wise people have said before that every event has two versions – an Indian version and a Pakistani version. Congratulations must be given to Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper for finding a subject that transcends this tyranny of version politics – the gnaw at the earth that surrounds us. In February, the paper held a conference on climate change where it did a strange thing and held fast to the belief that the diverse yet united South Asian voice needs to be heard on this. 

The Wire’s environment reporter Aathira Perinchery was meant to go. Aathira has covered the breadth of the country’s problems in facing climate change and knew intimately of the particular difficulties of reporting on the environment and climate in a country where laws were being diluted and officials were eager to bypass those that remained. She is also a wildlife enthusiast – a fact that The Wire’s readers are sure to have caught on to in her writing. But Aathira had a sudden but unserious accident. I would go in her stead.  

The process was very quick, so I had little time to be overwhelmed by the simple magic of the fact. Yet there was no escaping it. 

Wonder, hatred, memories and the darkest politics have swirled in two separate vats for the past eight decades, often allowing for beauty to seep through. For many like me who grew up in the nineties, and for whom moments like Chepauk applauding the Pakistan team’s Test victory in 1999 are cradled in sweeter recesses than the seemingly unceasing series of vignettes calling for blood, revenge and surgical strikes, Pakistan was a connection to be mended – its art to be applauded, its extremism to be cautious of. In Kolkata, as I grew up, it existed cautiously but gently. At school, we wrote letters to soldiers at Kargil but the most hatred we may have felt towards Pakistan was likely to have been towards its bowlers after an India defeat. Thanks to the people who dominated our reading lists in early youth – Khushwant Singh, Mohammad Hanif, Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid and Salman Rushdie – it was difficult not to think of Pakistan’s experience as one congruous to India’s. Like India, it was wretched, and like India, it was a constant work of interpretation. It existed, side by side.

Then came a brand of everyday Indian politics that has made it impossible to not be aware of Pakistan. Crores of Indians have shown that you can know nothing about a country and its people and still think of it with an intense and everyday hatred. 

We have shut our cinema to their actors, shielded our games from their players and ensured that to reach Islamabad from Delhi, you cannot take an aircraft that takes less than two hours to travel between the two capitals. You instead have to get up on a plane that goes to a third West Asian city, get off, get on a plane that will go to Islamabad from there and reach Pakistan a good 14 hours after you’ve set out from Delhi, in a macabre parody of every strand of logic ever shown by humans. 

Thus cruising on geopolitical hijinks, I arrived at pristine Islamabad for an audacious glimpse into the possibilities of seamless understanding. The conference was called Breathe Pakistan. Cradled by the Margalla Hills in a swank Convention Centre outside which spring was raring to go, it was difficult to imagine that this was a world in which anything was wrong.

And yet, indignation was writ large over the conference – Pakistan is one of 10 countries in the world which are most vulnerable to climate change despite not being anywhere near the top when it comes to emissions. Civil society participants shared space on panels with CEOs. Some platitudes were said, as is inevitable, but most of the discussion was frank and centred on the significant role of aid in this fight against climate change. Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE had not even started on their USAID blitzkrieg but Valerie Hickey, global director for climate change at the World Bank, said that she did not see the fight to get the responsible world to pay for its behaviour getting any easier.

A senior judge of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, Mansoor Ali Shah, spoke searingly of the need for an independent judiciary and its role in tackling corruption when it comes to big funds assigned to combat the fallout of climate change. Shah said he has no idea where essential portions of relief money for the 2022 floods went. “With all the information I have access to as a SC judge, I don’t have this information,” he said, as key ministers listened.

Experts and activists spoke frankly about the efficacy of plans and the necessity to secure climate finance on Pakistan’s own terms.

Young men and women listened, rapt. Once (but only once), the mic gave a slight feedback, forcing me to conclude that Islamabad was really not that far from home. 

In a session on the role the media can play in ensuring attention is paid to the common South Asian struggle against global warming and climate disasters, the panel comprised very eminent veteran journalists from Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and the UK. Nirupama Subramanian, a former Islamabad correspondent for whom it was a return to familiar pastures, said that the paper must be lauded for thinking of the united South Asia and bringing together these countries at a single table. Mahfuz Anam, the head of Bangladesh’s Daily Star newspaper, said he was 75-years-old and the time for collaboration in news delivery on the climate crisis could not be pushed any further into the future. 

Veteran conference-goers will know better, but there is a moment in successful meetings where all seems fine, regardless of how enormous the topic. Towards the end of the two days in Islamabad, I was convinced that the days ahead would see friendship and empathy. Warmth and understanding had informed all my interactions with Pakistanis. Young people spoke of the need to bring climate journalism in Urdu and congratulated The Wire for running a successful Urdu platform. A podcaster noted how he was supposed to study at a premium journalism school in Chennai but could not get a visa. A Punjab government consultant said she was thinking of how to implement the science of Sonam Wangchuk’s famous ice stupa models in Ladakh.

But mostly, and unerringly, they spoke lovingly of India – pulling out anecdotes of their brushes with our food, life and culture with a knowledge and respect that humbled me. India-Pakistan peace evangelist and activist Tahira Abdullah said that Kavita Punjabi, a dazzling professor of our times at Jadavpur University, had taken her around Kolkata years ago, so that Abdullah could make a pilgrimage to the Calcutta Girls School, where her mother once studied. 

Who does not know that the rivers that flow through India also reach Pakistan, and that some glaciers in Nepal melt to feed vast agricultural tracts in India? When a colleague and I went to the Sundarbans to record accounts of women shrimp farmers in 2022, our guide was a 22-year-old who knew every creek, bush and rice variety growing on the island he lived on. He said that he had just wandered across from Bangladesh as a child, swimming through shallow waters.

In the month since this visit, efforts to use Pakistan as a punitive catch-all have appeared all the more gnarly. A climate expert and veteran columnist, Ali Tauqueer Sheikh, who was at the same media panel that showcased several journalists was booked by Assam Police for ostensibly working with the wife of an opposition leader. Then, there was a cricket tournament in which India refused to play on Pakistani turf and over which a section of Indians, including prime minister Narendra Modi, decided to be their patriotic best. 

Now we have demolished a child’s house for appreciating Pakistan’s cricket; perhaps we can find a way to punish the air, the water, and the sweetness of people’s memories for having associations with Pakistan.