Tag: Sri Lanka
At Negombo, the Indian subcontinent meets where it still can
The photograph above was taken on the 11th of May in Negombo, on the western coast of Sri Lanka. The caption records the occasion plainly: friends from Pakistan, from Tamil Nadu, and from Sri Lanka, gathered with members of the International Teaching Centre and the Counsellors serving in the Indian subcontinent, at an Institutional Gathering convened by the Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Lanka.
We want to say something about what this image makes possible, and where.
Indians & Pakistanis cannot meet any longer
The hard fact first. There is no longer any practical way for an ordinary Indian and an ordinary Pakistani to sit in the same room inside either of their own countries. Visa regimes have hardened to the point of farce. The land border is sealed in spirit if not in law. What remains are the smaller states of the subcontinent and the wider diaspora. Of the smaller states, Sri Lanka is the one that handles the meeting most gracefully: visa-on-arrival to both passports, no overland complication, no political theatre, and a civic culture that does not ask either side to perform a position.
Which brings us to the older question, whether Sri Lanka belongs to our civilisational space at all. Some friends north of the Palk Strait still treat the island as adjacent rather than constitutive. We think this is wrong, and the reasons are not sentimental.
Sri Lanka is Dharmic? Continue reading At Negombo, the Indian subcontinent meets where it still can
India and Pakistan Are Playing Chicken; simply to hurt themselves
Two comments are worth picking up on, and one claim worth interrogating.
N disagrees that contact ameliorates ties. EK suggests the only Islamicate voices the Indian RW respects are those who have “debased their own civilizational integrity.” We do not know who he is shadow-tweeting. It could be us, the Founders of this blog, who are Islamicate by heritage and recognisably friendly to Hindu right-wing readings. Either way, the framing is off. And then there is Q, on the thread as we write, claiming Pakistanis “will eventually take over the Islamicate world.“
The cost of distance
The dominant idea of the last decade is that less contact means more security. Fewer visas. Less trade. No cricket. No artistic exchange. Reduced diplomatic warmth. This is sold as realism. It is, in large part, self-harm.
Distance does not produce clarity. It produces mythology. When people stop meeting one another, they begin imagining one another. The imagined neighbour is always simpler, darker, and easier to hate than the real one.
He is also, as Dhurandhar showed, sexier. Hatred and desire run on the same current. The more villainous the Pakistani on screen, the more the Indian audience leans in.
Civility is built by proximity. Not sainthood. Habituation. When people share space, study, trade, marriage, and culture, the room for fantasy narrows. One can still dislike the other side. But one dislikes actual people, not cartoons.
N’s response to this is that contact theory is “akin to blaming a victim for not engaging with the perpetrator.” That feels like the Israeli security story applied to the Indian Sub-continent. It assumes Pakistanis are a permanent terror-source requiring permanent counter-violence.
Pakistan obliges the narrative by behaving badly enough often enough to keep it alive. India obliges the frame by treating every bad actor as the median Pakistani. Both governments are now invested in the loop.
Pakistanis no longer defend hybrid Islamicate culture Continue reading India and Pakistan Are Playing Chicken; simply to hurt themselves