WASHINGTON: India and Pakistan, both nuclear powers, stare eyeball to bloodshot eyeball across a common border. The military buildup and exchange of fire on both sides is alarming and, even apart from the threat of nuclear war, the stakes are enormous: The two countries’ populations account for close to one-fifth of the human race, and about half their people live in poverty. The cost of sophisticated weaponry for both armies diverts desperately needed resources.

The populations of each nation have retreated further into the ideology of antagonism. Many Pakistanis are sure that Hindus cannot abide Muslim self-determination on the subcontinent. Indians are convinced that Pakistan will always try to weaken India with subversion, and perhaps even that there is a Muslim intention to overwhelm Hindu civilization.

But for many Indians and Pakistanis born in 1947, there has always been a countervailing set of national beliefs. Certainly, there was deep sorrow and anger on both sides at the bloodbath that partition turned into, and at the involuntary dislocation of millions of Hindus from Pakistan and Muslims from India. Parents and teachers reflected their own national versions of this. But people also grew up with a clear awareness that the two nations had a common history and culture. This notion of commonality, if revived, could be extremely useful in rebuilding understanding between Indians and Pakistanis.

In the wake of partition, Indian children were taught that Mahatma Gandhi, expressed a desire to go to Pakistan, whose formation he had opposed, to promote peace between Muslims and Hindus. Indians, the vast majority of whom are Hindus, knew that he was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic who thought him an agent of Muslim interests. Indians knew that Gandhi had begun his political career in India as one of the leaders of the Khilafat movement to defend the Turkish Caliphate against the victorious allies of World War I.

Pakistanis knew that Quaid-e-Azam, the great leader Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League and the indispensable strategist, champion and negotiator for the creation of Pakistan as a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims, proposed the creation of a common defence and foreign policy for the two nations. They knew that Jinnah not only formally articulated Pakistan’s identity as a plural and religiously tolerant, albeit Muslim, nation, but worked practically to persuade Hindus to remain.

They knew that he had begun his political career as an Indian nationalist, and had been described by none other than the legendary nationalist Gopal Krishna Gokhale as “the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity.” Today, neither Pakistanis nor Indians seem to remember the liberalism of Jinnah, who, as governor-general of Pakistan in 1947 and furious at a Muslim mob that had surrounded a Hindu group in Karachi, declared himself “the protector-general of the minorities.”

It is no wonder that the universal humanity these founding fathers represented transcended petty party politics. Beyond the Pakistani national myth that Muslims could not prosper or be secure in a predominantly Hindu India, and beyond the facile Indian nationalist disregard of Muslim concerns, lay the fact not only of a shared history, but of shared languages, customs, folkways and even religious ideas. In architecture or in the complexity of intellectual traditions or theologies, a visitor to the subcontinent would have found it difficult to distinguish purely Muslim or Hindu elements. Children played together.

Efforts to strengthen these links could start small. Ordinary Pakistanis and Indians almost never get to visit each other’s countries because of severe visa restrictions. But if, for example, Pakistani school children, who revere Jinnah, were allowed to visit Bombay, which he loved, to see his house and other buildings associated with him there, they could not help but understand India better. In turn, Indian children who read about the origins of their culture in the ancient archaeological sites at Moenjodaro and Harappa in Pakistan should be encouraged to visit them. They might just see Pakistan in a different light.

These days, children are rarely taught about the historical associations of their own leaders with the other country. Many do not know that President Pervez Musharraf, was born and spent his childhood in India and L.K. Advani, the hard-line Hindu nationalist home minister of India, came from what is now Pakistan.

To be sure, some commonality survives, particularly in the shared traditions of music and poetry. People are struck by the prestige of Urdu literary culture not only in Pakistan, but also among Indian Hindus and Muslims of the partition generation and their parents’, by the common tradition of classical music appreciated on both sides of the border, and by the fact that the popular music of one country is a hit with the young people of the other. With all of these similarities in mind, Indians and Pakistanis alike, should reexamine their past, which may well give valuable clues on how to approach the future. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.