Notes on the closing talks of “Divergent Voices of South Asia: Rethinking Partition, Reimagining Peace”; Mela Nordic, Filmcentrum Riks, Stockholm, 4 July 2026. Second of two parts.
Part I of this essay took Anuradha Bhasin’s blueprint, cross-border journalism, a shared archive, the arts as empathy machines, and held it against the graveyard of prior attempts: Aman ki Asha, decapitated after 2014; Himal Southasian, strangled in 2016 by withheld paperwork. The open question it ended on was survivability; who funds the structure, and where does it live, such that no single ministry can starve it?
The woman who followed Bhasin to the podium is, conveniently, the field test. Beena Sarwar, Boston-based journalist, documentary filmmaker, journalism teacher, helped run Aman ki Asha from the Jang side through its best years; the campaign’s achievements are credited in large part to her stewardship. She watched it stall. And in March 2021 she co-founded Sapan, the Southasia Peace Action Network, explicitly on the lessons learned, followed in August 2021 by Sapan News, a syndicated features service. The arc from mega-campaign backed by two media conglomerates to volunteer-driven network is not a decline; it is an adaptation to the kill mechanism. Her talk, “Think like a Journalist, Build Peace,” was the day’s answer to its own hardest question.
The minimum common agenda
She opened by walking the room through Sapan’s founding charter, pointedly not, she said, a mass signature campaign but an exercise in building a community, whose “minimum common agenda” runs: soft borders and economic cooperation; visas on arrival, or at least something like them; a commitment to human rights and dignity for all within one’s own borders before pointing fingers across them; and collaboration in every field where it is possible. That third plank is the quietly radical one; a structural ban on whataboutery, written into the founding document. Around 150 organisations across the region and diaspora have endorsed the charter, along with some 800 individuals; academics, journalists, students, artists. Among the endorsing organisations, she noted with a smile, is Mela Nordic itself: the host had signed the guest’s charter before inviting her.
Think like a journalist
The heart of the talk was a catechism, what it actually means to think like a journalist. Know your own position, where you are coming from. Be curious and open. Be observational, not judgmental. Provide facts, not opinion. Verify before sharing. Give the Ws and the H, who, what, when, why, how, with context, not as a laundry list of what happened and what was said. Hear all sides and represent them fairly. Go beyond binaries.
Look for the process behind the event; this conference, she pointed out, was itself months of process wearing the costume of a single day. Look for the nuance. And take the long view. She was candid that this describes the craft’s ideals, not its current practice: “that’s not what we are seeing journalists doing.”
She has carried one slogan with her for years, from the Video Journalism Movement; a Netherlands-based outfit, now defunct, for which she once made a film on Kashmir: there is more than one truth. And she immediately fenced it against relativism with a vernacular example: ek aadmi ka terrorist, doosre aadmi ka hero. Those, she said, are opinions. The fact is the act: this person killed that person; this action was or was not lawful. More than one truth does not mean no facts.
From there, her most useful coinage. In the age of social media, everyone who posts is functioning as a kind of para-journalist, para as in paralegal, paramedic: performing the function without the training, the editorial oversight, or the accountability. She told the story on herself of the Karachi journalist who bristled at the term, the hardworking stringer in a small town, he objected, is a journalist, full stop. She conceded the man and kept the category: it is precisely the absence of institutional scaffolding, not of effort or courage, that the prefix marks.
The ledger she then drew up was scrupulously double-entry. On the credit side, the para-journalist bears witness, surfaces what mainstream media ignores, gives voice to the underrepresented, and holds power to account; Palestine, she noted, being the defining case of a story the legacy press could not have buried in the social-media era. On the debit side: no verification, no context, personal attacks, and above all fuel for the ambient outrage culture in which everyone now lives.
That outrage economy got her sharpest political diagnosis. What do the followings of Imran Khan, Modi, Trump, and Bolsonaro have in common? Each strongman went direct; straight to his constituents, bypassing the filter of editorial oversight, the tiresome discipline of both-sides-and-all-sides. Publics hungry for overnight change meet men promising exactly that, and the tiresome truth, that the wheels of change move slowly, that there is process behind every event, gets no engagement metrics at all.
The brain, amended
Sarwar reached for neuroscience to explain the machinery, and here a friendly amendment is in order. Her framing ran through the “reptilian brain” and the left-right hemispheres; reactivity at the brainstem, reason in the cortex. The folk anatomy is shaky (the triune-brain model has been retired by the neuroscientists, and the hemispheres do not divide labour so tidily), but her behavioural point survives the correction entirely, and is better carried by Kahneman’s two speeds of thought: the fast, reactive system that social media is engineered to capture, and the slow, deliberative one that journalism’s disciplines exist to protect. Strip the anatomy, keep the truth: outrage is fast; verification is slow; the feed is optimised for the former.
And her strongest citation was the one she offered most tentatively. Research on political extremists, she noted, finds that the brains of people with extreme views, left or right, resemble each other more than either resembles the centrist’s. This is real and robust: Leor Zmigrod’s work at Cambridge found that intensity of partisan attachment, to either American party, predicted cognitive rigidity on objective neuropsychological tests, with self-described independents the most flexible of all; an inverted-U in which the far left and far right meet at the rigid end. (A phrase from the conference corridors earlier in the weekend, “leftist mullahs”, is, it turns out, peer-reviewed.) The shared traits Sarwar named, certainty in the righteousness of one’s cause, refusal to hear another point of view, are almost a lay translation of the findings.
The mirror against the wall
Her prescriptions came at two scales. For the individual: pause, breathe, reflect; refuse to be swept along by the tide; regulate, verify, and then post. For the region: Sapan News’s newest initiative, born of an ugly new fact. Since last May’s war, India and Pakistan have banned each other’s press outright; a dozen Pakistani news sites, Dawn among them, blocked in India; thirty-two Indian sites, the major mastheads among them, dark in Pakistan; reciprocal blocks the Editors Guild of India was still pleading against this January. Sapan’s response is Media Mirror: republishing, with permission, journalism from across the wall, so that readers on each side can still encounter the other’s reporting. It is not a manifesto. It is a workaround; which is exactly what makes it the operational answer to Bhasin’s blueprint. Where the states have built a wall in the information space, a volunteer network is quietly propping a mirror against it.
She closed with her most speculative idea, offered with disarming honesty. Sapan News and the Southasia Peace site both carry a code of ethics and responsibility; a Hippocratic oath, as she put it, for anyone engaging on social and digital media. She would like everyone who endorses it to carry a badge on their profiles, “I have signed the social media pledge, have you?”, to make others pause and think.
The open questions
Taken together, the two talks bracket the problem, Bhasin the institutional scale, Sarwar the individual conscience, and together they expose the three questions neither fully answers.
The first is the tension inside Sarwar’s own coinage, and it is the honest heart of the whole subject. The unmediated channel she credits with carrying Palestine past the gatekeepers is the same channel that carries the demagogue past the editors. Structurally, the citizen bearing witness and the troll manufacturing outrage are indistinguishable: both bypass the filter. What separates para-journalism’s credit column from its debit column is nothing architectural; it is precisely the list of disciplines her talk enumerates, adopted voluntarily, one poster at a time. An uncomfortable conclusion, because voluntary discipline is the one thing that does not scale on demand.
The second follows: can a pledge do any real work? On the enforcement reading, plainly not; adverse selection guts it, since those who would sign a civility oath are those who least need one, and a name on a website rewards signalling over conduct. The accountability with teeth is institutional, newsroom- and platform-level; which the para-journalist lacks by definition. But Sarwar had already supplied the better reading an hour earlier, describing her own charter: not a signature drive but the building of a community. Professional norms have never spread primarily by policing; they spread by modelling; by enough visible practitioners behaving a certain way that the behaviour reads as the mark of belonging to something. Eight hundred names on a founding charter is not an enforcement mechanism. It is a nucleus. On that reading her pledge is not naive at all; it is a slow instrument, consistent with everything else she said about the long view.
The third is the one Part I pressed: money and domicile. Bhasin’s proposals need funding at scale; the graveyard shows funding at scale is exactly where the strangler’s hands go. Sapan’s volunteer model is, in one sense, the perfect counter-design, you cannot freeze the grants of an outfit that runs on none, but volunteerism caps out well below the scale Bhasin rightly demanded. Somewhere between the conglomerate-backed campaign that was decapitated and the volunteer network that cannot be, there is a design waiting to be specified: endowed rather than grant-dependent, diaspora-anchored, multi-jurisdictional, digitally domiciled, with no single ministry holding a lever. That design document is the real homework this conference set its region.
Coda: the unbroken raag
The day did not end with journalism. It ended, as perhaps it had to, with Ali Sher’s The Unbroken Raag, two hours of music, memory, and the echoes of Partition, the arts doing, in the event’s final act, exactly what Bhasin said journalism cannot: creating the empathy on which everything else depends. A raag, unbroken across a border that broke everything else, is as good a closing argument as any speaker managed.
One last detail, typographic and therefore easy to miss. Himal always wrote Southasia as one word; a house style that was really a thesis, the copy desk’s quiet insistence that the region precedes its partitions. Sarwar’s network carries the convention in its very name: the Southasia Peace Action Network. It is a small thing, a missing space. But a region that has learned to write itself as one word may yet learn to read itself as one story; Pakistan’s floods, India’s heatwaves, Nepal’s vanishing glaciers, one Himalaya, one meltwater, one story. The alternative, as Bhasin said in closing, is to keep fracturing along lines that will eventually become impossible to hold.