Dalai Lama
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It's an old article but still relevant. I thought it was worth a read.
How Pakistanis see India | World news | The Guardian
Earlier this year, while in Delhi for a writers' conference, I met one of my compatriots from across the border. "It's such a relief, isn't it?" he said. "Coming to India and discovering that, despite the hype of the past couple of years, it's still just another inefficient, dirty, third-world country like ours." The subtext was clear: a truly shining India would make Pakistan feel very dim by comparison.
But whatever the consolations of India's inefficiency, it's impossible to ignore the fact that Pakistan's position in the world centres around its murky role in the "War on Terror" while India's centres around economics.
'Twas not always thus. Pakistan has long been in the habit of feeling superior to India in economic terms. At the start of the 90s when I was, bafflingly, taking A-level economics in Karachi, our teacher taught us all we needed to know about India's protectionist economy with the sentence: "The only part of Indian cars which doesn't make a noise is the horn."
What, then, is the impact of the reversal of fortunes of the past decade? For the more thoughtful segments of Pakistani society it is reason to take a critical look at the failures of Pakistan's policies. Nayyara Rahman, a business student, told me she envies the Indians "because their growth is not frothy like ours; it's more sustainable, because it includes the wider spheres of the population, and not just the fringed elite". And Ameena Saiyid, the MD of Oxford University Press, Pakistan, also admits to envy - particularly over India's refusal to allow "its cows and elephants and other religious symbols and beliefs to impede their march to economic growth while we have got totally entangled in our burqas and beards".
But for a number of Pakistanis there remains doubt about whether the reversal of India's fortunes is real or just a giant bubble of hype. The Nation columnist Amina Jilani says: "Pakistan is loath to admit India even might be a growing power. In local idiom, we think we are both 'same to same'."
When I pushed another Pakistani for evidence that, deep down, Pakistan hasn't accepted its economically weaker position he responded: "The arms race. They test a missile, we test a missile." And it's true that Pakistan seems to have learned little from the collapse of the Soviet Union as it tried to keep up with America's defence spending. Perhaps it's apt, in a tragic-satirical way, that the arms race is one of the few areas in which Pakistan and India's economic muscles grapple with each other. In most other areas the approach is strictly hands-off: trade with India has always been severely restricted. Change is under way, but Pakistan continues to link economic progress to "forward movement on all fronts", which everyone recognises as a reference to Kashmir.
There are dissenters to this "keep India out" view. They include film-maker Hasan Zaidi. Given the might of Bollywood, one might assume that he would be the last person to call for an opening up of markets (at present, Pakistani cinemas are banned from showing Bollywood films, although they are readily available on pirated DVDs). But Zaidi points out that the Pakistan film industry is already in "a death spiral", that there's much to be gained by bringing across technically accomplished Indian films, and that India is a huge market that Pakistani film-makers can take advantage of.
Of course it's not just goods that have a hard time crossing borders. Visa restrictions mean that people, too, have a difficult time witnessing first hand life on the other side. That might change when - and if - India's economic growth allows it to make the one claim that remains elusive: that its poverty rates are lower than Pakistan's. That eventuality may well mark the point when Pakistan's labour force turns its eyes away from the Gulf and Europe to dream of earning a livelihood in a country where language and custom are not barriers. For the moment, though, India and Pakistan exist primarily in each other's imaginations, and our reactions to each other continue to be based on old psychological wounds.
· Kamila Shamsie grew up in Karachi, which is the setting of her most recent novel, Broken Verses (Bloomsbury).
How Pakistanis see India | World news | The Guardian
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