I was reading through this interesting book about how Pakistanis and Indians have come to perceive each other and their countries over the years, I felt like sharing some interesting excerpts I came across.
"One of my colleagues, Mariam, a twenty-two-year-old graduate from the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), told me she had hated India. She had hated it so much that when her father was posted to Delhi as a defence attaché, she had told him, ‘Abba, take us anywhere else in the world, why does it have to be India?’ For months, she and her sisters dwelled in this misery. Her younger sister, Maham, would cry her eyes out every night. She would say, ‘Hum India kyun ja rahe hain? Udhar tou sarey kafir hotey hain . . . woh tou achey nai hotey.’ (Why are we going to India? Only infidels live there. They aren’t good people.) Maham was of a tender age of five."
"Another student I worked with in a school had started crying hysterically when I passed around a picture of a Hindu deity; she was in Class 6, studying in an upper-middle-class school in Lahore that I worked in. When I asked her what happened, she told me her eyes had sinned; that she would now go to hell because of what she had seen."
"Later that year, when I took a few students with me to India for CAP’s Exchange-for-Change programme, one of the Indian schools had received us with garlands and music. The principal had moved forward to place a tika on our foreheads. Three of the Pakistani students had begun to cry; they turned and asked me if this meant they had become Hindu. They said they had heard Hindus would forcibly convert Muslims to their religion; was this their fate too?"
"This time, my question regarding what was special about India was received with pin-drop silence. Then a few children at the back started to snicker. A small girl nervously raised her hand and in a meek voice asked, ‘Shahrukh Khan?’ The others began to roll from side to side with laughter. ‘He’s a Pakistani, stupid! He’s Muslim. Muslims can’t be Indian,’ said one child. Another overconfident student got up from the middle row and declared, ‘India has nothing! They will all go to hell!’
" Adnan, a ten-year-old student of seventh standard, was sitting amongst these children, armed with his own jokes to crack. ‘Indians don’t cut their hair, Ma’am,’ ‘They are dirty people,’ ‘They are cheaters; that’s how they won the cricket match!’ Though not every child participated in the mockery and many perhaps only did so due to peer pressure, for several initial weeks that I returned to the school, I was received with the same sarcastic expressions, crude comments and empty-handed students. Many of the students told me they hated Indians, that they didn’t want to write them any letters. No one in the room had ever been to India and the majority of the students had never met an Indian either. However, the hatred they expressed seemed almost personal, and incredibly powerful."
"These students have been nurtured in a Pakistan that has fought several wars with India; some whose fathers were in the Pakistan Army would have felt the direct impact of the rivalry across the border. They have also heard about Indian soldiers committing atrocities at the LoC, of harassing Muslims in Indian Kashmir. They have been told, just as I was, that India took away not only Kashmir but also East Pakistan. Many recent conspiracy theories state that India is behind the terror attacks in Pakistan, that they are funding terrorist outfits so that Pakistan becomes unstable and eventually collapses under its own weight. These theories are becoming increasingly popular, so much so that auto-rickshaws across Lahore publicly carry signs that read, se rishta kya? Nafrat ka, intikam is our relationship with India, but that of hatred and revenge.) Perhaps it was this relationship that the students were emulating and displaying in their classrooms, too. In fact, it wasn’t just the students; school administrators and teachers also showed similar, though more subdued, sentiments."
"I had toured many schools across Lahore before finding three to work with. Most schools wanted to have nothing to do with an exchange programme that was with India and we had received many rejections. The tagline of the project—‘to celebrate similarities and appreciate differences’ between India and Pakistan—angered most people. A head administrator of one of the largest upper-middle-class private school networks in Pakistan told me that by suggesting such a programme, I was challenging the Two-Nation Theory. Why would we want children to explore the similarities between the two nations when there was nothing similar in the first place? After all, that was why Pakistan had been created, because we were two separate nations that could no longer live together. She told me the project was a waste of time and I should instead initiate it with China. When I told her the cultures of China and Pakistan were very different, she told me I didn’t realize how different those treacherous Indians were from the pure and innocent Pakistanis, and then politely asked me to leave."
"Over time and under the fear of their principal, the students began to jot down their thoughts and ideas. Messages started to pour in and while several brilliant letters and poems were composed, giving us a breath of relief, others were tarnished with disgust and scornful remarks. ‘India is the worst country on earth,’ ‘We hope you die,’ ‘We will never come to India!’
Are we really this hateful, ignorant, and intolerant? Pakistanis would have you believe that we actually "love" India and that it's the evil and hateful Indians that hate us for no reason. That it is just a false perception of us and propaganda. Reading through this book, it seems we are as hateful and ignorant vis a vis our neighbors if not more. I could also share some excerpts from the book about how the Indian students perceived the Pakistanis and what they said.
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