The most rewarding thing while attending a literature festival or a seminar for me is not the speaking opportunity but the interaction with people, particularly the younger generation. Most enlightening is meeting so many writers, persons of words and wisdom at such events. Most assuring is the fact that not many people are influenced by the hyper-nationalist electronic media. Most envious moments are meeting people who are much younger, and yet they have achieved so much as writers of different genres. Most frustrating is when there are two parallel sessions of equal interest at the same time. And most disturbing is when a person goes on and on hogging the limited time allocated for the Q&A.
At the second Bangalore Literature Festival (BLF), which was held in the lawns of a posh hotel of the Electronic City from September 27-29, I experienced of all the above. Bangalore’s typical cool breeze blowing was making the atmosphere pleasant enough to have discussions gently on heated topics, barring the session on ‘Is economic development a garb for hard Right politics?: The ‘Gujarat Model’ BJP representative failed to control their temper against critics of Narender Modi’s politics. Close to general elections in 2014 India is polarised between the pro and anti Modi elements.
My book was launched at a session on ‘South Asian Voices: Writings for Ourselves.’ Kanak Dixit of Nepal, Farah Ghuznavi of Bangladesh, Ashok Ferry of Sri Lanka and Mira Hashmi of Pakistan were on the same panel. The issue was whether writers from South Asia write for their own audience or they are looking for a wider range of western readers. But the thrust of the session drifted to a dream that South Asia should be made a union like European Union.
Being a Pakistani, I was also the natural choice for the session “In the Shadow of the Gun: Literature from conflict zones.” Other panelists were a young Kashmiri poet Farooq Shaheen, Assamese writers Arindam Borkataki and Jhanvi Barau. Amandeep Sandhu, who comes from Indian Punjab, which was once a conflict zone, moderated the session.
Shaheen who has grown up in a conflict zone sounded cautious about expressing his feelings. Being a poet he summed up the suffering of Kashmiris and said “Even the tears of happiness are mixed with blood.” Borkataki maintained that though militancy has gone down in Assam but still many militants are living in the neighbouring countries. Most families have one or two members who had joined the militants. But the people are living peacefully in Assam, he says, and they also demand a special status in India because of the area’s historical background. He is collecting the poetry of the militants, which made me an wonder if anybody is doing that in Pakistan. There is the Baloch resistance poetry but what about the jihadi groups. We may disagree with them but it should be recorded for the sake of literary history. My contention was that Pakistanis are living in the shadow of al Qaeda-inspired terrorist guns for over two decades in which over 50,000 people have died including our soldiers who are fighting against them. But as a writer, I maintained that one should rise above religious, national and ethnic biases and write as a humanist whether he/she lives in the conflict zone or not.
This clicked to the younger generation who asked most of the questions and also interacted with me on the sidelines of the BLF. What was rewarding was that they were not hostile against Pakistan as the hyper-ventilating TV anchors in India and Pakistan are. They want the world to believe that people of both the countries hate each other. This indeed is most irresponsible journalism. Most of these young people were students and IT industry employees, who want to have a peaceful solution of the outstanding issues with Pakistan. They have a much broader perspective than those who appear on TV talk shows. As the talk of the day was whether PM Manmohan Singh should meet PM Nawaz Sharif at that time, and to my pleasant surprise, most of the people I met at the BLF and the two IMA CEOs forum in meetings in Delhi and Bangalore were for continuing ‘uninterrupted’ talks as my friend Mani Shankar advocates.
But whether you talk to CEOs of Indian businesses, writers or the younger generation, which forms 60 percent of India’s population, two questions were inevitably asked by them: one, though Nawaz Sharif sounds sincere to build the peace bridge with India, will the military let him do it? And two, will Pakistani military stop supporting terrorists who cross the border and if they want can they do it?
My response was that firstly we should realise that in most countries the war economy is so big, including India and the USA, that military has an undesirable influence on foreign policy. Secondly, no vested interest groups become angels overnight and have a change of heart for peace. Indians should realise that in Pakistan now the business class is the ruling class, who are enthusiastic about having peace with India because it makes business sense. They have been nudging the military establishment to move towards peace if they want economic growth that can sustain big defence budgets. And thirdly, Pakistan army wants to ‘diffuse’ tension with India because they are bogged down with tackling the internal threat, worried about post-2014 Afghanistan fall-out and their Chinese friends have set an example for them by putting border disputes with India in the cold storage.
Interestingly, one CEO of a large Indian company who travels to South Asian countries for his business asked me. “Why does India have bad relations with its neighbours?” I could only say that though by virtue of its population and economic size it is acknowledged as a ‘big brother’ by other South Asian countries even though the official mantra is that we are all equal nations, which is far from realpolitik, India does not carry itself with big brother magnanimity and sagacity. When I asked the same question about India relations’ with neighbours to a leading Indian scholar Rajmohan Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, he blamed it on India’s “pompousness.”
Lastly, I have to talk about Vikram Sampath, a young man in his early 30s, who I am envious of. He is founder of the BLF along with his writer friends Shinie Antony and social banker Srikrishana Ramamoorthy. But what is more important to me is that Sampath started researching at the age of 11 on the Wodeyars dynasty who ruled Mysore for 600 years. He kept on collecting and at the age of 25 published his researched book. He left his promising managerial career and is now dedicated in recording ‘the artistic representation of history,’ as Aristotle had put it. Sampath also wrote a book on Goharjan, the first singer recorded in India thus the first gramophone celebrity. He is now deeply involved in building the Archive of Indian Music (AIM) in cooperation with the Information Ministry. I wish somebody should take initiative on building the Pakistani music archives. Are there any takers? Perhaps Arshad Mehmood can do it!
The writer is author of the recently released book ‘What’s Wrong With Pakistan?” He can be reached at [email protected]