There are few things more fascinating to outsiders than the relationship between ordinary Indians and Pakistanis when they meet face to face. We might curse each other furiously all year and routinely call for each others’ blood but when we are put face to face, something strange happens – the overwhelming emotion expressed isn’t hatred but curiosity.
Where is your family from?
Do you have roots here?
And if you are Punjabi, it’s pretty much guaranteed that within a couple of hours everyone will be crying together about intergenerational memories of Lahore.
This isn’t an “urban elite” phenomenon. Pakistani writer Salman Rashid writes in A Time of Madness of his journey back to his family home in Punjab and the curiosity and kindness of people on the road, who could instantly tell he was from Pakistan, merely by the way he looked at his old home.
The YouTube comments sections on many Punjabi artists are usually filled with comments of cross border warmth, as are videos of Pakistani stars like Fawad Khan and Mahira Khan. This behaviour persists despite international relations between the two countries having being particularly fraught for most of the last two decades.
Much of this spirit was visible when the PCB men’s cricket team landed in Hyderabad recently for the ICC Cricket World Cup 2023. For the first time in seven years, a Pakistani cricket team was on Indian soil, and the excitement of the crowd was palpable. The PCB released a video of their arrival and there are shouts of “Babar bhai” and “Shaheen bhai” along with cheers and waving. The security personnel look amused, and the cricketers look slightly bewildered before remembering to wave back.
Does this mean that all is well between the countries and the Indian public has ceased to ask for accountability from Pakistan for harbouring terror? Of course not.
A cursory view of any television debate will tell you that there is no dearth of cross border animosity in our country. It just means that people are moderately excited to see some legendary Pakistani cricketers here. And yet, even this mild bonhomie is intolerable for some.
Maneka Guruswamy, writing in the Indian Express, taps into the latent anger many Indians feel at the loss of defence personnel lives to argue that in the wake of the recent Anantnag anti-militant operation, the Pakistani cricket team should not have been invited to play in the ICC Cricket World Cup in India. Leaving aside the obvious technical point about the tournament being one where countries participate by virtue of their qualification and not at the host’s discretion, we’re left with a fundamental question: when we choose to appropriate grief and channel that into anger at civilians, what do we gain and what do we lose?
My own first experience of meeting people from Pakistan wasn’t too different from the crowd at the Hyderabad airport.
We used to host a debate at college, and the welcome accorded to teams from Pakistani colleges was less loud, but certainly equally warm. There would be no dearth of volunteers to wake them up and make sure they got to their debates on time and the flower stall at the accompanying fest was always inundated with requests to send them flowers. Years later, I heard that one of the kids many of us made friends with at the debate, a boy named Bilal, died shielding his little nephew in a terrorist attack at a mosque in Karachi. Which meant that the first victim of a Pakistani terrorist attack that I had met was Pakistani.
The statistics bear this out. Guruswamy may be right to call out Pakistan for harbouring terrorist groups but in her rush to vent her ire on the cricket team, she forgets this – Pakistani civilians are among the biggest victims of this terror and by rabble rousing in India against them, we do little to help our own cause.
It is easy to appropriate grief and self-righteously call for boycotts of cricket teams and artists, but harder to ask for accountability from our own systems and processes.
A February 2021 Frontline investigative report revealed that that 11 intelligence inputs warning of the Pulwama terrorist attack of February 14, 2019, were ignored.
These are serious allegations and have yet to be addressed in any meaningful form by the government, despite being raised by the opposition and by former J&K Governor Satyapal Malik. On the larger geopolitical front, it is fair to ask our government what we have actually accomplished internationally to put pressure on Pakistan to end the harbouring of terror. But we do not do this. We focus instead on petty actions like banning Pakistani artists from Bollywood and demanding our cricketers and cricket fans be discourteous to theirs.
For bonus points, we make life hell for Kashmiris living and studying in other parts of India.
In this era of social media jingoism, it’s difficult to define patriotism. Does patriotism mean parroting the talking points of the government in power without critique? There are certainly many who subscribe to that view. And yet, I would argue that true patriotism in the face of grief requires affixing institutional accountability within our country so that losses are never repeated and calmly advocating the best interests of our nation abroad. The petty thrill of finding personal targets to hate like Pakistani cricketers or film stars forces us to look away from the larger picture, and gains nothing.
Sarayu Pani is a former lawyer, writes at tattva.substack.com and tweets @sarayupani.