Screengrab of police in Leicester separating the Hindu and Muslim communities
In Leicester, U.K., police have arrested 47 men after Hindus, mostly Indians, attacked Muslims, mostly Pakistanis, following the Indian cricket team defeating Pakistan in an Asia Cup match on Aug. 28. After the scuffle, instead of quietening down, the two communities started rioting. Why did the two communities, who have lived side-by-side peacefully for decades, misbehave? In recent years, both sides have been brainwashed into separate moral righteousness under nationalism, especially as aggressively religious India seems like becoming more and more like Pakistan. This is more serious than the past when the two states were at each other’s throat on Kashmir but their peoples went their own way. Rather than nationalistic, the current change is religious, leaving offenders unable to see reason.
Ironically, it is Pakistan that is currently ruled by “practical” rather than an “ideological” ruler, who prefers to think of economic advantage over twisted nationalism. India has done economically well under the BJP, known for its religious fervor, but increasing global risks have now made it amenable to any proposal of policy-change that enhances India’s economic outreach. The world is aware that this lure of economic advancement through two-way cooperation might lead to good times in a South Asia challenged by overpopulation. China, India’s largest trading partner, plans a road going through Pakistan which means, if all goes well, the dilatory roundabout way of trading with India on the sea could be avoided with Pakistan benefiting from being the middle state for India-China trade. In this scenario, Pakistan and India must realize their people are going for each other’s throats abroad simply because their home states are following policies of needless hostility.
One recalls that two “practical leaders”—then-prime minister Manmohan Singh and then-president Asif Ali Zardari—had met after the 63rd United Nations’ General Assembly and had agreed to Pakistan allowing India overland access to Afghanistan. Today, given the fraught situation, one can’t think of it but one should pay heed to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif when he says he would like to have good relations with India just as Pakistan faces looming food insecurity after the flood havoc in Sindh and Balochistan. It is pathetic that Pakistan’s Foreign Office came out saying if trade relations are to resume then India should ask first. Now that Indians and Pakistanis in London are making fools of themselves, bringing a bad name to their countries, it is time to become practical in Islamabad and New Delhi.
An Indo-Pak trade corridor has been on the cards for decades, having also been spoken of by General Musharraf in one of his rare, enlightened moments. He was thinking, in paradigmatic terms, about converting Pakistan into a trading hub for South Asia. Since he had begun to build the Gwadar Port—not first conceived by him, let us admit—the network of roads and railway tracks branching from the port seemed to leave India out. But later he began to speak in more general terms and was once privately in favor of conceding the Indian request that a corridor be given it for trading with Central Asia. Not long before that an Iranian oil pipeline going to India through Pakistan had come to a halt on the Balochistan border with Iran. The Leicester incident must compel India and Pakistan to rethink their relationship and benefit from trade that both countries need more than war.