Violence versus prosperity

People of India, Afghanistan and Pakistan must seriously dissect the misinformation being heaped on them.

A mother grabs her child by his hair and thrashes him soundly, yelling at the top of her voice. The child is guilty of doing exactly the same thing to his younger sister because she hit his puppy over the head with a stick for, seemingly, no reason at all. The father emerges from inside the house. He wants to know what all of the furor is about. His wife screams at him and he hits her hard across the face. Then he kicks his motorbike, which falls over with a crash with something — goodness knows what — breaking in the process.

The parents grew up with violence in their respective childhood homes and know no better: their children have already learnt the violence and unless the chain is broken, their grandchildren will learn the same and so on down the line. This ingrained violence — for that is what it is — spills over into society at large, creating ever-spreading ripples as it goes.

The same can be said of Pakistan today: we are a nation brought up on hard knocks, stressful situations and downright fear of so many diverse, yet overlapping, things that it is difficult to highlight just one example. Unless, that is, the accusatory finger perpetually aimed in India’s direction is taken as a point in case.

The two neighbouring countries have been at war overtly and covertly more than once and a high percentage of the populations in both countries is still blindly prepared to blame the other for each and every single one of their woes. This ridiculous situation is further aggravated by biased press policies on both sides of the border with extremely outmoded, self-destructive policies being perpetuated, which are way past their sell-by date. Hanging on to and aggrandising past hatreds is self-destructive to the nth degree. And even though trade barriers are slowly coming down and visa regulations are supposedly relaxing, old grievances are still being continually whipped up. This does not, by any stretch of the imagination, promote the desperately needed peace which leads to prosperity for all.

Not satisfied with allowing ourselves to be continually beaten with the ‘hate India’ stick, we and our Afghan brothers and sisters are now increasingly at each other’s throats, largely due to organised mudslinging in both directions. In the long term, this will be equally destructive for both as the two countries — Pakistani interference in Afghan internal affairs aside — have much to offer each other on a sustainable basis.

The regularly stoked up animosities between Pakistan and India and Pakistan and Afghanistan serve no one other than those with vested political interests, foreign war mongers and unscrupulous global profiteers. And as always, it is the people, especially those living on or below the poverty line, who suffer from these machinations of economies based on greed.

It is imperative that the people of these three adjoining countries take time to seriously dissect the misinformation being heaped on them from biased quarters. They must think for themselves and reach their own commonsensical conclusions and join together in peace.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 28^th, 2012.