After celebrating common culture and heritage Now, the real tests

1st May 2010, Time of India.

The civil society desire for peace could only be translated into a bulwark against war if more people travelled and reporters from each other’s countries brought home shared narratives of joy and misery, editors held. Last weekend, security experts, former generals and admirals and political analysts from India and Pakistan met behind closed doors in Lahore to declare that peace wasn’t something normatively desirable but an imperative for Pakistan’s survival as a nation. Hostility was not a policy Pakistan could pursue without imploding under the double weight of fighting the Taliban in the West and guarding borders in the East. It was nobody’s case that an overarching peace accord could be embraced instantaneously but plodding along the Aman ki Asha path would build a sturdy safety threshold that could absorb the occasional shocks of terror and barbs of extremism.