Aman Ki Asha

About two-thirds of those polled in India and almost three-fourths of those in Pakistan said they desire a peaceful relationship between the two countries. Only a tiny minority, 17% in India and 8% in Pakistan, are opposed to the idea of consigning hostility to the dustbin of history.

The neighbourhood we live in may be the deadliest in the world, but it also is one in which the yearning for peace is enormous. Indeed, the very fact that the horrors of hostility have been brought home so forcefully to all those who live in this neighbourhood may explain why two nations that have had such an embittered relationship voice such a strong cry for some sanity. In an extensive poll conducted jointly for The Times of India and the Jang group of Pakistan, it was that an overwhelming majority want a peaceful relationship. Most hearteningly — and unexpectedly — there is also a high degree of optimism about the possibility of an end to hostilities and there is a widespread recognition that bringing about that happy denouement is not a task that can be left to the two governments alone.

Aman ki Asha polled people in six Indian cities as well as respondents in eight Pakistani cities and 36 villages to feel the pulse of a sub-continent besieged by violence and fear. About two-thirds of those polled in India (66%) and almost three-fourths of those in Pakistan (72%) said they desire a peaceful relationship between the two countries. It’s not as if the rest were opposed to the idea of harmony. A sizeable chunk in both countries — 17% in India and 20% in Pakistan — neither agreed nor disagreed with the statement that

“I want peaceful and friendly relations to prevail between India and Pakistan”. In other words, only a tiny minority, 17% in India and 8% in Pakistan, were opposed to the idea of consigning hostility to the dust bin of history. For countries that have fought three wars and one mini-war and have accused each other of abetting terror, those figures are a whole lot better than what you might expect.

In India, the urge for peace was more or less uniform across gender, age and socio-economic categories, but in Pakistan male respondents were surprisingly more strongly in favour of the idea than their female counterparts (77% to 66%).

The survey tapped respondents in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad in India. In Pakistan, the cities covered were Karachi, Hyderabad and Sukkur in Sindh, Islamabad/Rawalpindi, Lahore, Multan and Faisalabad in Punjab and Quetta in Baluchistan.

Desiring peace is one thing, but is there a genuine feeling that it is possible? Once again, we were pleasantly surprised by the findings of the poll. A clear majority in both cases — 59% in India and an even higher 64% in Pakistan — said they were either “very hopeful” or “quite hopeful” that they would see our current state of antagonism becoming a thing of the past within their own lifetimes. In India, the women were more optimistic than the men on this count, though not by a huge margin. Also, respondents from the SEC B socio-economic category were somewhat more hopeful than those from the more elite SEC A category and the relatively young (ages 18 to 19) were just a touch more hopeful than the older lot aged 30 to 45 years.

Can people-to-people initiatives — which is what Aman ki Asha is really all about — be effective in bringing about the peaceful relationship that is so fervently desired? The vote in this case was decisive. In India, 78% said they were an “effective” or “very effective” instrument of peace. If that sounds massive, the verdict was even more unequivocal in Pakistan, where 85% chose one of these two responses. In fact, an impressive 43% in Pakistan said it would be “very effective”. We couldn't have asked for a more resounding endorsement of our earnest belief that civil society initiatives can and must make a difference.

Indeed, we wouldn’t have imagined the response would have been so clear.

What explains the scale of this endorsement? A large part of the explanation would seem to lie in the answers to another of the questions asked in the survey. We asked the respondents to rank the current state of the relationship between the two countries on a scale of 1 to 9, where 1 indicates “hostile” and 9 indicates “friendly”. We also asked them to do this rating separately for relations between the two states and between the two peoples. On both sides of the troubled border the responses were revealing.

While the average rating given by Indian respondents to state-to-state relations was 3.65 (indicating “cold”), the same respondents rated people-to-people relations at 4.15 indicating something closer to “neutral”. On the Pakistani side, state-to-state relations were rated on average at 3.79, while people-to-people relations were rated at 4.61 on average. In other words, while Pakistanis had a more positive view of the relationship than Indians, both sides agreed that the rapport between people was better than that between the two governments. It is not difficult to see why they believe civil society initiatives are the way forward from here.

On each of these questions, there were significant variations in the responses from different Indian cities and there was at least one clear pattern to those variations. Delhi and the southern cities of Chennai, Hyderabad and to a lesser extent Bangalore were more inclined to take a positive view of both the current state of relations and the prospects of peace than the other cities.

In contrast, Mumbai was clearly the city with the most gloomy perspective on each of the questions asked.

A majority, 54%, for instance said they were not hopeful of peace being achieved in their lifetime. Given the horror of 26/11 that is hardly surprising. But the fact that even in Mumbai 50% said they wanted peace against the 42% who didn’t and 52% voted for people-to-people initiatives as the way to move towards that peace must be seen as a vindication of Aman ki Asha.