The Indo-Pakistan feud keeps South Asia apart, but a criss-crossing media is rapidly bridging the subcontinental gap.
ALIENS from another planet, or at least, strangers from faraway foreign lands. Not quite. But to a large extent that is how a Pakistani visiting India feels. Yet, paradoxically, there is also an inescapable sense of familiarity. It´s like coming home, but being in a strange land, where everything is what you expect it to be, but so very different. The cliches come fast and furious: so near and yet so far… There is the undoubted affinity between the Punjabi-, Sindhi-, Gujrati- and Urdu-speaking people across the border. But for other regions of India, Pakistanis are near-total foreigners. Witness the scene, on a Calcutta street last December when a young journalist from Lahore was stopped and asked for his autograph by a student who couldn´t believe he was actually face to face with a real, living Pakistani.
"The new generation on both sides knows nothing about each other and both sides are demonising each other," wrote columnist I. Hassan, after a visit in March to his alma mater in Dehradun, the Royal Indian Military College. "Younger people who met my wife or myself were surprised that we spoke the same language, wore the same dress and were just ordinary human beings like them. Young cadets wanted to know what the land looked like across the border. When told that the Indo-Gangetic plain was the same all the way from Peshawar to Calcutta, they found that incredible."
As the rest of the world becomes a global village, the great chasm between India and Pakistan too will have to be bridged. And it is happening. On the one hand, opinion-makers and policy analysts from the two sides have been able to sit down and talk, thanks to the increasing number of intra-regional conferences and workshops, often organised or funded by international donor organisations. On the other hand, the common man gets a chance to see how the other side lives through the popular media that is gaining increasing popularity on both sides.
The most popular television channel in Pakistan is Zee. Although not state-owned, it is definitely an ´Indian´ channel, and it plays to the lowest common denominator with its game shows, chat shows, sing-along programmes, and reruns of popular Hindi films and songs. In India, meanwhile, a Pakistani feels proud of all the appreciation shown for Pakistan Television tele-dramas (available both on television and in video cassettes), particularly among Hindi- and Urdu-speakers. The television screen, indeed, has managed to do what the diplomats found impossible to do for decades—permeate this most distanced of South Asian relationships.