State of the Union: Bridge the Partition
There’s a popular belief that at the people-to-people level all is well between India and Pakistan, and the problem is really between the establishments in the two nations. A ceremony described by the former finance and external affairs minister in the Atal Behari Vajpayee government thus: “We have that ugly ceremony at Wagah, almost vulgar, I don’t know why we are continuing it, but we are.” This machismo has been going on since 1959. There may be many myths about the pappi-jhappi revelry between the two people, but the fact is that only a minuscule number of India’s 1.2 billion population have actually seen or met a Pakistani. Similarly, why hasn’t any entertainment channel thought about a Masterchef India-Pakistan or South Asia, or a street food face-off that brings out the region’s culinary diversity into the homes of ordinary people? While these may not lead to any solution of the so-called “core issues” between the two countries, these are really premised on the classical Westphalian concept of a nation state, a construct based on borders and geographical boundaries between nations, which the Internet is making almost irrelevant with virtual universes like FB Nation and Twitter lands in play.
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