Discussing South Asian peace: Part – I

The Black Hole is a community centre in Islamabad that holds engaging discussions, conducts informative sessions, and offers entertaining performances nearly every day.

Established in March 2022, it will soon celebrate its third birth anniversary. This is the brainchild of Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy, a distinguished professor of physics and a social commentator and writer of repute.

With Pervez Hoodbhoy, the moving force behind this initiative is Chaudhry Umair, an enlightened industrialist from Lahore and a dedicated social activist with multiple projects of social development to his credit. The team also boasts educators and intellectuals such as Dr A H Nayyar, Dr Saadia Manzoor, Arshad Mahmood, and many others. From applied and social sciences to art, culture, education, history, language, literature and politics, there is hardly any discipline that the Black Hole Islamabad is not interested in. Discussions on new and old books and ideas is a regular feature at the Black Hole.

If you just look at the programmes (all available on Facebook and YouTube) of the last few days, you will see discussions on Bacha Khan and his Khudai Khidmatgars; a multinational dialogue on South Asian Peace with speakers from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and the USA; and introductory sessions on books by Ali Usman Qasmi and Kamran Asdar Ali.

The session on peace prospects in South Asia held on February 13, 2025, was in collaboration with South Asian Peace Action Network (Sapan) that senior journalist and peace activist Beena Sarwar is spearheading. The discussants were Kushi Kabeer from Bangladesh and Rita Marchanda from India.

But before discussing The Black Hole-Sapan session about peace in South Asian, some background to peoples’ peace initiatives is in order. Right before and after the partition of India, there were killings and extreme violence on both sides of the divide. The two countries – Pakistan and India – that could have lived peacefully on the pattern of Canada and the US, turned hostile to each other right from the inception of Pakistan. The Kashmir War of the late 1940s shattered the dreams of peace for a while but soon things appeared to be improving.

In the 1950s, the scars of the partition violence started diminishing and there were mutual exchanges of delegations and even sports events such as cricket and kabaddi were held especially in Lahore. The Sikhs and Hindus who had to migrate to India could visit their hometowns and meet old friends as visa restrictions were not as stringent as they later became. My father who was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1932 had travelled back and forth multiple times from 1947 to 1954 till he finally settled in Karachi. Then again he could visit his hometown in 1964 and met his old comrdaes there.

Overall peace prevailed and nobody expected that the fortunes of this region were about to change for the decades to come. The Himalayan war between China and India in 1962 was not a good experience for India. Its prime minister J L Nehru who was one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1955 suddenly found all his aspirations evaporate in thin air. He died in 1964 a broken man whose achievements on domestic and international front had paled in the aftermath of the defeat at the hands of China which once had been a good friend.

All this prompted the first military dictator in Pakistan and self-styled field marshal General Ayub Khan to overestimate his own strength. First, he rigged the local and national elections in 1964-65 and then found himself at the receiving end of hatred by nearly all the political parties in the country. His blatant use of state machinery to manipulate the elections to defeat Fatima Jinnah – sister of the father of the nation M A Jinnah – made him extremely unpopular in the country.

The single most important turning point in Indo-Pak relations that paved the way for long-lasting mutual hatred and diminished the peace prospects to a large extend in the region were the events of 1965. The post-1965 period was marked by internal strife in both India and Pakistan as Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi faced revolt in her own party in the late 1960s whereas Ayub Khan lost power to his own army chief Gen Yahya Khan.

The next blow to regional peace came about in 1971, after which Bangladesh emerged from the ashes of East Pakistan. Now in the regional peace dynamics there were three countries: Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. Bangladesh under the command of Mujibur Rahman was initially friendly to India and hostile to Pakistan as the new Bhutto government had refused to recognise Bangladesh as a new country. But by February 1974 the situation had changed when during the conference of the Islamic Summit in Lahore, Z A Bhutto acknowledged that Bangladesh was now an independent country. That facilitated the arrival of Mujib to attend the summit. Earlier, the Simla Agreement between Bhutto and Indira had also been signed.

In 1977, General Zia’s takeover of the government in Pakistan installed another military dictatorship in the country. From 1977 to 1988, Gen Zia tried his best to maintain peaceful relations with India as he was busier on two other fronts. One was the domestic front where he was crushing the democratic aspirations of the people of Pakistan by arresting and incarcerating thousands of political activists and cracking down on all dissenting voices. Then there was the western front after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Zia succeeded in maintaining peace on the eastern borders with India.

In the mid-1980s, Pakistani activists and intellectuals such as I A Rehman, Mubashir Hasan, Dr Mehdi Hasan and Asma Jahangir, discussed with their Indian counterparts such as Nikhil Chakravarty, Nirmala Deshpande, Kuldip Nayar and Rajni Kothari the possibility of initiating people-to-people dialogues.

In Pakistan, Mushahid Hussain, editor of the daily Muslim Islamabad, and Rehmat Shah Afridi of the Frontier Post hosted dozens of Indian intellectuals and journalists in Pakistan in the late 1980s. After Benazir Bhutto became prime minister of Pakistan, the Saarc conference was held in Islamabad but right-wing politicians and vernacular newspapers mostly criticised the government for allegedly selling out the country to India.

In the early 1990s, the civil society peace activists came together to discuss the establishment of a joint forum to promote peace and democracy. Their efforts bore fruit and in 1994 Pak-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy (PIPFPD) took shape. It was a mouthful, so most people for ease of tongue just called it the Pak-India Peace Forum. The first joint statement in September 1994 read inter alia as follows:

“A group of concerned citizens from India and Pakistan, from different walks of life, have been engaged in a process to initiate a people-to-people dialogue on the critical issues of Peace and Democracy. As a follow-up to this, a group of 25 persons from the two countries met in Lahore on September 2, 1994 and after consultation came to the conclusion that the crisis in their relations was being deliberately maintained by the ruling elites in utter disregard of the common interest and aspirations of the people of the two countries.”

A list of notable participants endorsed the statement from Pakistan. These names occupy a significant place in the struggle of peace and democracy in South Asia.

To be continued