“THE PAKISTAN-INDIA RELATIONSHIP”

<< “FROM SOUTH ASIA TO SAARC”:Update

“DIMENSIONS OF TERRORISM” >>

Globalization of Media MCM404

Lesson 33

"THE PAKISTAN-INDIA RELATIONSHIP"

Text of handout for students

Note: The subject of this lecture is fairly extensively covered by books recommended in the reading list for

the first 9 lectures as well as by the reading list for this lecture itself. The daily news media, print and

electronic, in Urdu and in English carry material that is also of on-going relevance in view of the generally

positive direction taken in relations between the two countries since January 2004.

The text of this handout provides students with reflections on the notable duality of the relationship. The

content of this handout is a short essay written by this lecturer in December 1991 and published in a leading

newspaper of Pakistan in the same month. Despite the passage of 14 years since the publication of this essay,

the duality and complexity referred to in the text remains wholly or substantially true in 2005! Or perhaps

students may have their own valued opinion on this aspect. Through their answers to questions in

assignments and in the final exam, we should be able to explore different aspects of this unique bilateral

relationship.

Formal legitimacy and illicit informality -- by Javed Jabbar

Of the many paradoxes that mark the relationship between Pakistan and India perhaps the most revealing

one is the fact that virtually simultaneous to the legitimization of independent Statehood for both countries in

August 1947, the actual people-to-people relationship became an illicit one.

The genesis of the illicit bondage was wild and violent in the ire and the fury that marked Partition and the

pain-filled migration of millions across new over-night borders.

Though the water of time never quite washed away the blood-stains of agonising birth, the unavoidable reality

of many shared features gave the first 18 years a fairly ambivalent character. The Muslim-Hindu dimension

of the ancient relationship retained a primeval prurience, appealing and repelling at one and the same time.

There were and are so many splendid instances of close human relationships segmented by the borders.

Senior army officers on one side who had brothers on the other; venerated teachers there, outstanding

students here and vice versa; civil officers who had served together, and deep friendships galore.

For the first 18 years of the relationship the illicit aspect grew slowly yet surely, made more so from our

viewpoint by the initial conflict over Kashmir and recurring disputations about Hyderabad Deccan, Junagadh,

Manavadar, Goa, Rann of Kutch, Sikkim, and from the other side, their adverse reaction to our entry into

military pacts like CENTO and SEATO and other assorted actions.

Perhaps the high point of this teenage love-hate linkage was the visit of Jawaharlal Nehru to Karachi in 1960

to sign the Indus Waters Treaty with Ayub Khan. One remembers the chaste Urdu in which Nehru spoke at

a reception in Bagh-e-Jinnah, Karachi and briefly, the odd couple of a civilian political leader and a handsome

military dictator became an awkward yet interesting symbol for a relationship that appeared to have a notable

elasticity.

The 1965 war stripped away much of the formal pretence and exposed the raw substance. The media began

to play a major role in the relationship. No single phenomenon reflects the ironies better than the voice of

Noor Jehan, introduced to the world through the film music of Bombay and Lahore in the 1940s, singing in

1965 the memorably lilting and exhortative war song addressed to Pakistani soldiers fighting India: Ae watan

ke sajeele jawano.

The aftermath of the 1965 war formalised the illegitimacy that had so far been latent. The import and

screening of Indian films was banned while the limited number of pre-1965 films which had been imported

earlier into the country began to be screened furtively in the drawing rooms and compounds of houses on

noisy 35 mm film projectors and occasionally on 16mm machines.

101

Globalization of Media MCM404

Newspapers, books and magazines, never too widely available, now disappeared from vendors and

bookshops and were found only on the black market grid. And even though radio could not be regulated,

and listenership of programmes such as Binaca Geet mala on Radio Ceylon increased in order to quench the

thirst for "contact", there emerged a general awareness that the two States looked askance at a close

relationship between the two peoples.

This is when the role of the intelligence agencies and police forces of both countries became particularly

offensive. They seem to take an almost perverse pleasure in harassing citizens who meet diplomats from the

unfriendly neighbour, suspecting every one who does so of being subversive.

The special procedure to obtain endorsements for travel to India on what were otherwise "International

passports" and the discomforting, if not, humiliating procedure for obtaining visas and then having to report

at police stations upon arrival and departure from the cities of the other country became expressions of the

attitude that had come to mark contact between the two peoples.

Six years later, in 1971, the tragedy of East Pakistan took place, largely precipitated by our own open-eyed

blunders as well as by blind ambition but also crucially wrought by India that knew and later admitted

that it was a historical, not-to-be-missed, opportunity for the halving of Pakistan's original State-size.

After the signing of the Simla Agreement and the exchange of POWs in 1972, the withdrawal from occupied

territories et al, the failure to reopen the land route via Khokhrapar on the Sindh-Rajasthan section of the

border, signposted the descent of the relationship to a new low of mistrust.

Through the 1970s, though the emotive links remained, there began a divergence away from each other by

the two people. This was only halted by the uncontrollable advent of media technology rather than by an act

of political will.

The first of these media-related interventions for a resumption of indirect contact between the two peoples

was the commencement of telecasting by Amritsar TV in the early 1980s. This change stimulated increased

viewing in India of PTV programmes from the Lahore TV centre and equally attracted high viewership in

Pakistan's Punjab of Indian feature films and film songs shown on Amritsar TV, partly to deliberately attract

Pakistani viewers to Indian TV.

The second major media-related intervention was the advent of VCR machines, video tapes and finally, video

cassettes, that enabled Indian feature films to be pirated on to video within hours of their release in India to

be smuggled to cities and towns throughout Pakistan for replication and viewing in thousands of Pakistani

homes.

During the 1980s, the video phenomenon was the most vivid manifestation of the illicit dimension of the

relationship, an illicitness so distinctly tinged with desirability that thousands of video rental shops

proliferated across the country under the very eyes of the police and the law-enforcement system that were

both unwilling and unable to enforce controls in this respect.

Reciprocally, video technology gave an opportunity to enterprising and unlicensed entrepreneurs to export

recordings of PTV plays that became widely popular in India.

With the resumption of diplomatic relations in the late 1970s, there was a revival of exchange of cricket

teams. The bat-and-ball spectacles on public grounds broadcast and telecast live to huge audiences in both

countries, as also encounters on the hockey field created for the first time in history a spectacular, open

setting for the observance of the complex Pak-Indian relationship. It was now legitimately adversarial in the

context of sports and yet remained illicit on subterranean levels of the psyche.

There was an unusual juxtaposition of a representative of the military elite which, in both countries, is seen as

being hostile and aggressive to the other country and the representative of a cinema industry generally viewed

as the one sector in which both countries have always conducted an illicit friendship. This was expressed in

the cordiality between the person and family of General Ziaul Haq and the Indian actor Shatrughan Sinha by

102

Globalization of Media MCM404

which, de facto, it was being conceded that the illegal video circuit ran through the residence of the Pakistani

chief of army staff.

And in a strangely melodramatic kind of way, both the fact that the relationship had begun to extend over

more than one generation and the fact that the inter-twined nature remained a major factor came through

when Rajiv Gandhi met Benazir Bhutto for the first time in Islamabad in December 1988 during the SAARC

Summit and referred to the Simla Agreement to say "When your father and my mother met in Simla in

1972...".

Whether technology makes ideology irrelevant or whether technology is used to attack ideology becomes

apparent in the way in which the golden film songs of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s continue to be played

openly and loudly from paan shops and audio cassette players in the villages and towns of both countries. In

the middle of radio programmes beamed by one country's network at listeners in the other country,

programmes brimming with memorable music will sandwich blunt, hard-hitting propaganda that aims to

subvert the opinion of listeners across the borders.

Despite common membership in SAARC and the Commonwealth, despite an increasing frequency of contact

between leaders and officials as well as non-governmental citizens, despite the continuation of travel across

frontiers, the Pakistan-India relationship remains difficult and dualistic, still steeped in a potent mixture of

historic intimacy and traditional alienation, of formal legitimacy and illicit informality.

103

Table of Contents: