One important point that seemed to have been largely ignored was the fact that our quarrel is not with the Pakistani people – themselves victims of terrorism – but with the Pakistani state and its creation and support of anti-India terror groups. Of course, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his Kozhikode speech of September 24, did exhort the Pakistani people to fight poverty, illiteracy and infant mortality, saying, “let both countries fight to eradicate poverty and lets see who wins,” instead of listening to their leaders “reading out scripts written by terrorists on Kashmir.” Yet, by banishing Pakistani actors from Bollywood – because some sections of opinion in the country demanded it – we have achieved little but the further alienation of India in the minds of the common people and civil society in Pakistan. The latter are what Robert Gates once called – albeit in a different context – the people in between, neither friends nor complete adversaries, a group among which there are those who favour peaceful relations with India, although this number is yet nowhere near a critical mass. In any crisis situation short of war, keeping avenues of communication and interaction with public sentiment in the adversary’s society open cannot do harm. Here again, it would seem that the decision-making apparatus in the government allowed the guillotines to fall without timely intervention. Our struggle as a nation is not only to end that scourge without words – terrorism – but also to build support for peace and negotiate settlements to problems in Pakistan, as well as the rest of South Asia. If India were to engage in more pre-emptive strikes, in the name of self-defence, to take out terror camps on the Pakistani side of the LoC, there is little the rest of the world could say or do to condemn such actions. The world would understand. But retribution practised in the cultural sphere or involving people-to-people interaction is rarely endorsed by anyone beyond a sympathetic national audience.
