THE latest sign that the leaders of India and Pakistan could actually mean what they say when they declare their “determination” to normalize relations came Tuesday when senior officials of their foreign ministries decided to explore the possibility of arranging reunion of divided Kashmiri families. The suggestion to tackle the “human side” of their row over Kashmir came from India, and Pakistan agreed to consider the plan. That offer-and-acceptance format itself is an indication of how the pattern of Pak-India dialogue has changed. Almost always in the past, if a constructive proposal came from one side, the other made it a point of honor to reject it. That gave both parties a chance to go home and claim to their people how they had refused to surrender to the “enemy” and showed him his place.
It often suits governments to have such divisions. For decades, neither Pakistan nor India wanted a solution to the Kashmir standoff because the existence of an external enemy enabled both sides, when it suited them, to divert attention from domestic problems. How could you demand food, work, security or freedoms when the nation is under threat? That argument wins every time.
While politicians were winning, Kashmiris were paying a terrible price in pain. All people whose land is divided, whether Kashmir or Korea today or Vietnam or Germany in the last century, suffer an awful dislocation — as artificial as it is terrible. Relatives and friends are torn apart, physically, emotionally, legally and financially. A fertile valley which once was crossed for family celebrations becomes a dangerous dividing line, its harvest merely razor wire and mines. Separated families cannot even wave to each other from either side of the valley because the division is patrolled by nervous soldiers and loving waves between broken-hearted family members could be the signals of spies.
This is the true misery that was for so long overlooked as government thundered against government, army fought against army and political leader maneuvered against political leader. To allow even a few of these divided families to reunite, even in the artificial surroundings of meeting rooms along a heavily guarded border, will be an overdue admission of the concealed tragedy that has blighted Kashmir. And if that becomes, over the period, a normal affair where a mother can embrace her son without making the guardians of their borders tremble for national security, India and Pakistan will have won a stupendous victory over the worst of all human evils — indifference to human suffering. Once their national leaders bring themselves to see conflicts as human pain, they will have started their walk to peace.
Islamabad and New Delhi can no longer afford to keep their enmity alive. For all their nuclear bravado, capability and missiles, the enduring reality of India and Pakistan is poverty, hunger and deprivation. They need economic growth and foreign investment. So long as the Kashmir dispute invites on the region the description as one of the most dangerous flash points of the world, investors will take their money elsewhere.
