I.A. Rehman is journalist and chair of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan as well as of the Pakistan-India Peoples' Forum for Peace and Democracy. He was interviewed by Kanak Mani Dixit.
Who is to be blamed for the continuing distance between South Asian peoples?
he ruling elite of South Asia, in whose interest it is to keep the people of the region apart. The elite would like to erase all history. You see, when politics was communalised, history too got communalised. Some of the seeds of confrontation were of course sown by the British themselves. To my mind, successive governments of India and Pakistan have been following the politics of the early 1930s. Instead of making a clean break from the troubled past, they want that past to be alive.
At the turn of century, India represented a unity of people with a shared history and a common purpose of ousting alien rulers. People subscribing to different religions had lived together for many centuries and a considerable cultural intermingling had taken place. Back then, to my mind, there was something like an Indian people, an Indian character, and something like an Indian hope. Unfortunately, the failure of the political leadership in the third decade of this century led the people of India up the path of mutual hatred.
Do you see some kind of federation as the ultimate future of the South Asian countries?
e should not jump the gun, for when we do so we alarm those in the establishment. Firstly, we have the difficult task of convincing the custodians of power that their confrontationist attitude, which ignores the geographical, cultural and economic pulls within the region, actually does grave harm to their own long-term interests. The inter-state conflicts have drained our societies of so much resources. If these conflicts were resolved, the elites themselves would be more honestly and securely ensconced in power. Today, they all rule by usurpation and imposition rather than by popular will. We should have been building schools, hospitals and industries rather than lapsing into this stupidity of testing nuclear devices.