... Encounters between Indians and Pakistanis are charged with an emotional content that you seldom come across when estranged peoples get together. Curiosity is of course very much at work. But so are fear and longing, nostalgia and affection, hopes of reconciliation and cynicism about any live-and-let-live prospect, not to speak of an abiding suspicion about each other's motives and ambitions.

Somewhere along the line you also witness feelings of rage and shame that successive governments in the two countries have been taking their peoples for a ride over the past fifty years ..

... The malaise ... to a very large extent, must be traced to the ideological foundations of the two countries. The very creation of Pakistan was premised on the assumption that Hindus and Muslims of the sub-continent constitute two separate "nations". Their religious beliefs and practices, their value systems, their culture irrevocably set them apart.

That assumption continues to guide the policies and actions of Pakistan despite two facts that palpably exposed its inadequacy: one, the creation of a separate homeland for the Sub-continent's Muslims did not settle the fate of millions of Muslims who chose, either voluntarily or through force of circumstances, to remain in dependent India. And two, the emergence of Bangladesh as a sovereign country deprived the two-nations theory of its bite.

It would be naïve for anyone to expect Pakistan's ruling elites, especially the omnipresent armed forces, to even think of re-appraising the ideological foundations of the country ... No Pakistani, even the most liberal one, is comfortable with leftist and liberal claims about the "composite" nature of the sub-continent's culture. Such claims are inevitably regarded - as do claims about the superiority of Indian secularism - as an insidious avatar of the domineering urge of the Hindus. This scepticism gains an edge of urgency every time the votaries of Hindutva perpetrate their misdeeds like the felling of the Babari mosque.

For people-to-people contacts to be meaningful, it would therefore be necessary for the peace activists in Pakistan to build public opinion in their own country against officially-sponsored anti-India propaganda and terrorism across the borders. And it would be necessary for their Indian counterparts to relentlessly struggle against the depredations of religious extremists, Hindu, Muslim or any other. These burdens of history are the "core" issues not nuclear bombs or Kashmir .. (Source: The Times of India, 7 May, 2000)