THERE is nothing novel about progressives in India and Pakistan advocating peace between the two countries. We have continued to swim against the hawkish tide which insists on forever war between forever antagonistic nations. The hawks have been winning since the outset, but after the brief military exchange of May 2025, the voices of those who invoke the shared interests of ordinary people on both sides have been almost completely drowned out.
Once upon a time the ideological battle was waged by easily identifiable segments; the professional intelligentsia, state and corporate media, political classes, and so on. Last year’s conflict clarified that social media platforms are now most important, with 1.75 billion people across both sides of the border being the central protagonists in the construction and propagation of narratives.
Put simply, the very same young masses who share real, material interests are on the front lines of an ideological war in which everyone across the Radcliffe Line is an enemy.
Young people are easily drawn to this narrative, as succinctly explained in a recent article on these pages about ‘The Outrage Machine’, because hate sells, especially when there is money to be made by legacy and social media platforms alike.
Hate-filled rhetoric drowns out shared youth struggles.
But hate also sells because a large number of young people in India, Pakistan and the rest of South Asia suffer economic hardship and are increasingly repressed. It is thus that their pent-up anger can be directed towards the proverbial ‘enemy’. There have been no ‘Gen Z’ revolts in Pakistan and India like those in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal, but material deprivation and attendant articulations of class rage are acute all the same.
Let us put this into context: by conservative estimates, 600 million Indians are part of the active labour force, a figure that is around 80m in Pakistan. Some 12m to 15m Indians and 4m to 5m Pakistanis join this labour force annually. The vast majority of these teeming millions can only find precarious and often highly exploitative work in the so-called ‘informal sector’. While Pakistan’s manufacturing base is meagre, the combined might of India’s IT, textiles, pharmaceutical and other industries is able to absorb around one out of every 10 young Indian workers into formal and relatively secure jobs.
The situation in the rural peripheries from Balochistan to Jharkhand is also remarkably similar; millions of peasants, pastoralists, forest and mountain dwellers and fisher folk face expropriation while age-old ecologies are wilfully destroyed by the state-capital nexus. This is all done in the name of developing the productive forces, the deployment of wondrous new security technologies and the creation of tourist havens for the proverbial middle-class consumer.
This middle-class consumer is, of course, largely imagined as belonging to metropolitan cities dotted with air-conditioned plazas, pristine highways and elite ghettoes. But the metropole contains its own periphery; the millions who live in katchi abadis in Karachi and Islamabad mirror those who live in the sprawling slums of Delhi and Mumbai. Indeed, the unrelenting, violent evictions taking place in Islamabad at the moment have played out in India’s metropolitan cities time and again.
Our shared present extends to a putatively shared future. It is now common knowledge that climate change threatens our region more than any other in the world. Yet the ever more frequent floods, smog, extreme heat waves, forest fires and other breakdown events, which afflict the most vulnerable in both countries are not just due to historical emissions from Europe and its settler colonies. The ruling dispensation in both co-untries protects the propertied class whilst exacerbating ecological crises. And in any case, getting the Western core countries to pay climate reparations requires all South Asian countries to make common cause.
India is a much bigger country than Pakistan. The Modi regime and the militant Hindu right have created massive troll armies to fan hate, a lot of it against Pakistan. It has also weaponised religion against Muslims, Scheduled Castes and other oppressed groups in India. The BJP’s most recent victory in what was once the communist stronghold of West Bengal confirms just how deep Hindutva’s tentacles have spread.
Meanwhile, generations of young people in Pakistan have been bred on a militaristic ideology that depicts India as the arch-enemy. This has been the primary justification for diverting public resources away from the welfare of working people towards the establishment.
This is not about who blinks first. It is about the consciousness and well-being of most of this region’s people. The tidal waves of hate will eventually engulf us all.
The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
Published in Dawn, May 8th, 2026
