After celebrating common culture and heritage Now, the real tests

As dawn broke this New Year’s Day, we brought to you, our readers, a ray of hope that peace between India and Pakistan was possible and necessary for changing politics, business and the very rhythm of life for many in the subcontinent. The Times of India and Pakistan’s largest media house, The Jang Group, launched Aman ki Asha with a commitment to peace but with some hesitation on how the campaign would be received.In the first phase, as we celebrated our common heritage, culture and food through performances and events, the response we got was more than overwhelming.
Buoyed by the success, we tapped further into this yearning for peace on both sides of the border and started to delve deeper into the how and when of it. As thousands of men, women and children offered to sign on in India and Aman ki Asha started developing into a civil society movement in Pakistan, we got intellectuals, artists, journalists, strategic analysts and even politicians to discuss the generational hostilities threadbare. When the Jang Group invited top editors from both countries to a common platform last month, the call that emerged was one for sobriety and understanding.
The civil society desire for peace could only be translated into a bulwark against war if more people travelled and reporters from each other’s countries brought home shared narratives of joy and misery, editors held. Last weekend, security experts, former generals and admirals and political analysts from India and Pakistan met behind closed doors in Lahore to declare that peace wasn’t something normatively desirable but an imperative for Pakistan’s survival as a nation. Hostility was not a policy Pakistan could pursue without imploding under the double weight of fighting the Taliban in the West and guarding borders in the East. It was nobody’s case that an overarching peace accord could be embraced instantaneously but plodding along the Aman ki Asha path would build a sturdy safety threshold that could absorb the occasional shocks of terror and barbs of extremism.
The two nations are some distance from resuming normal diplomatic relations but that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistan’s Yousaf Raza Gilani met this week on the sidelines of the Saarc summit in Bhutan for talks gives us encouragement to escalate the Aman ki Asha initiative to the next level. Over the next fortnight, we move away from the softer issues that could act as the glue and turn the spotlight on the more contentious ones like Kashmir, terrorism, hostile visa regimes and potential obstacles like water and discuss mutual apprehensions in a bid to sketch a roadmap to peace.
Beyond confronting the hurdles to peace, the bedrock of any people-to-people engagement has to be trade and economic co-operation. If China and US ties grew on the back of an expanding business relationship, there’s every reason to believe that removing barriers for the flow of goods and services will remove misgivings and suspicions that remain the major hurdle towards attaining peace.
In the Aman ki Asha Trade Meet on May 18-19 in New Delhi, business leaders from India and Pakistan along with powerful politicians from New Delhi will meet for two days to talk about the need to grow trade as a way to smoothen the road towards a diplomatic settlement. In the run up to the meet, we will take a hard look at the opportunities for increased economic cooperation, as well as how trade can impact the larger course of relations.