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The year was 1942. World War II had been raging for 3 years.  To prepare defences against a possible German advance into India through Iran, the British Indian government was frantically constructing roads and airfields and was recruiting engineers in large numbers.  I had appeared in final engineering examination and the family was keenly discussing the options for my career.  The stern voice of my uncle settled the question.  “We are against war.  We have lived in this town for six hundred years and no member of our family has ever served in the military or police or a government department dealing with the control or taxation on alcohol or narcotics”, he thundered.  To this day I cannot understand how in our town comprising educated petty land owners, professionals, writers and poets, of which our family was a part, came to adopt this particular stance against war.

Lying 55 miles north of the Indian capital, Delhi, Panipat had acquired fame in history as a battle field.  It was an ancient town dating back to several thousand years.  To the east of the town flowed the river Jamuna flanked by thick forests.  To the west were extensive marshes.  In between there was a dirt road, a highway of immense strategic importance.  It was the shortest, direct route to the capital of India.  Scores of conquerors had taken this route since time immemorial.  Until British hegemony was established in 1820, battles, big and small, frequently raged in and around Panipat — almost four for every century.  Those of 1526, 1556 and 1761 proved fateful for the history of India.

Since the 11th Century A.D, the town had been a popular abode of sufi saints and had become famous all over the Islamic world as a seat of scholarship and learning.  At the end of 13th century the most famous saint of Panipat, Bu Ali Shah Qalandar, a fakir who went about naked earned the wrath of Muslim ulemas (religious scholars) who condemned him to death for writing a blasphemous verse.  One Khwaja Malik Ali, a scholar of Islam, who lived in Herat, Afghanistan, issued his own fatwa (religious edict) declaring the Indian fatwas to be incorrect and was successful in saving the life of  qalandar.  The ruler of the Sultanat (kingdom) at Delhi, Ghiasuddin Bablban [died 1286)], who must have been wary of executing a popular icon like Bu Ali Shah Qalandar, was pleased with Khwaja Malik Ali and awarded him honours and a large tract of land in township of  Panipat.  The Khwaja was the progenitor our tribe.

On account of the frequency of wars Panipat was not a safe place to live.  Every battle brought death and destruction, loot and plunder.  The houses in the town had complexes of underground shelters and tunnels which children of the house kept discovering as they grew up.  All houses had doors, windows and roofs connecting one house to the next.  The complex of houses allowed exit on to several streets.  Stories of how a great-grand mother of a family hid her jewellery and escaped before looters arrived, were common.

It was only natural that over centuries the people of the town should develop hatred for wars.  They should abhor violence and evolve a culture of peace.  Thus under the patronage of a long line of saintly sufis, scholars and poets in their own right, the people preferred to devote themselves to research, scholarship and education.  According to a well known historian of Panipat, there were at the end of the 13th century, 700 scholars living in the town.  The sufi saints not only provided the intellectual and spiritual basis for the world view adopted by the citizens but also political strength.  No king dared to be on the wrong side of the politically harmless and saints, whose authority to issue fatwas (religious edicts) was recognised and who were greatly revered by the Hindus and Muslims alike.  No wonder that the exemption from paying land revenue granted to the town in the 13th century was not withdrawn by any government including that of the British.

Another fascinating aspect of the town was the evolution of a   matriarchal culture of unique feudal variety.   Women inherited and owned land and houses.  The houses of the elite were known by the name of the senior most woman of the family.  The absence of large areas of cultivable land had prevented the growth of big feudal lords and small land holdings offered no scope for the development of a male leisured class.  Lacking industry and incapable of becoming a centre of trade on account of poor and unsafe means of communication, Panipat was a frugal society.  However, men educated at its plentiful religious houses could find jobs as teachers in schools and as mullahs (priests) in mosques all over the country.  When a man left the town, his mother, elder sister or wife looked after her tiny holding as well as that of the absentee male.  Over time women acquired a dominant role in the society.

In 1947, disaster struck Panipat.  The entire Muslim population of the town along with millions of other Muslims from the province of Punjab were forcibly evicted, at a few hours notice to migrate to Pakistan.  What ensued was a bloody mass migration unprecedented in magnitude in the history of the world.  It was a one-sided war.  Atrocities of every kind were committed and about half a million Muslim lives were lost.  The trauma was immense and foundation was laid for deep mistrust, prejudice and antagonism between the two new states of Pakistan and India and their peoples.  The forcible eviction changed the psyche of a peace loving people.

In less than 40 years six wars or serious warlike operations took place between Pakistan and India:1948, Kashmir; 1964, Rann of Kutchh; 1965 and 1971, all along the border; 1984, Siachin Glaciers and 1999, Kargil.  Sundeep Waslekar of the Strategic Foresight Group, Mumbai, India reports combined death toll of 22,600 with 50,000 soldiers wounded.  Huge amounts were spent on military. For example India and Pakistan spent more than $ 40 billion in 3 years (2001-02 to 2003-04).  Cost of the conflict over the icy wilderness of the Siachin glaciers in the Karakoram mountains was over $ 400 million for the year 2002-2003.

The 1965 war between India and Pakistan was to leave a deep imprint on the psyche of the people of Pakistan, especially along the eastern border of the country.  I too was profoundly affected.  The Indian army was within 12 miles of my house, I could hear the booming of the guns and regretted the inadequate preparation of the Pakistan Army.  Will there be another forced eviction, another massacre and another migration was the question in everybody’s mind.  While I was opposed to the regime of the military dictator, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, I offered my services to the commander-in-Chief, General Musa Khan for war duty which he declined.

On 22 September, 1965, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, speaking at the Security Council of the United Nations announced the cessation of hostilities by Pakistan forces.  Before making the announcement, he said “But we are resolved to fight for our honour, to fight for Pakistan, because we are victims of aggression.  Aggression has been committed against the soil of Pakistan.  But, irrespective of our size, irrespective of our resources, we have the resolve, we have the will to fight because ours is a just cause.  Ours is a righteous cause”.  He went on to add “We will wage a war for a thousand years, a war of defence”.

The speech changed the history of Pakistan.   Bhutto emerged as a national hero, immensely popular in those districts where Indian bombs had fallen during the 1965 war.  Bhutto alleged appeasement over the peace treaty with India signed at Tashkent (USSR) by President Ayub Khan and Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri.  Serious differences emerged between President Ayub Khan and his foreign minister.  They separated.

By 1966, I had scaled down my lucrative practice as a consulting engineer to dedicate myself to social and political work.  A group of like minded, educated men and women in their thirties met every month at my house for one year discussing social, political and ideological issues.  It was 1967, when we ended up with framing a manifesto for a new political venture based on radical socio-economic change.  Simultaneously, Bhutto announced his intention to form a new political party.  Our group discussed with Bhutto and his ideological mentor, J. A. Rahim, the aims and objectives of his party to be announced.  Upon reaching agreement, Bhutto and Rahim invited our group to join hands in launching the new party.

The founding convention of the new party was held at my house in Lahore at the end of 1967.  We named it Pakistan People’s Party.  We came out with a strong socialist and nationalist stance: no peace, no war with India; self-determination for the disputed State of Jammu and Kashmir; nationalization of banks and insurance businesses and of resources of energy, electricity, gas and of basic industries such as steel, automobile, heavy chemicals, fertilizers, cement and shipping.

In 1969, President Ayub Khan’s government was toppled by his army chief General Yahya Khan.  The new general held elections in 1970, the first ever in Pakistan on the basis of adult franchise.  To the utter surprise of the U.S. and the feudal landlords of Pakistan, our party won a landslide victory in the province of West Pakistan.  In the other wing of the country, the province of East Pakistan, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman’s Awami League swept the polls.

General Yahya Khan refused to transfer power to the elected legislature; indeed, he decided to crush the elected political powers, one by one, by force of arms and started the army action in the province of East Pakistan.  His action in East Pakistan resulted in India-Pakistan war of 1971.  The province of East Pakistan emerged as the new nation state of Bangladesh.  In West Pakistan, General Yahya Khan was forced out by his army commanders and power was transferred to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his Pakistan People’s Party in December 1971.

Our government began the task of making a defeated country stand on its legs, by implementing the nationalization programme as promised the in the party’s manifesto.  We were extremely fearful of further Indian aggression, this time on its western border and as Bhutto’s minister of finance, planning, development and “Economic Affairs”, I gave funds as much as I could for guns, aircrafts and new divisions of the army.

Within six months of our coming into government, Pakistan and India signed at Shimla an agreement on bilateral relations to put “an end to the conflict and confrontation that have marred the relations”.  They resolved to “work for the promotion of friendly and harmonious relationship and the establishment of durable peace in the subcontinent . . .”.  It was a resolute step forward for peace and against war.

In 1977 our government was overthrown by the military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq and 1979 and Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed.  The efforts between India and Pakistan to avoid a future war received a grievous blow.

Another decade passed.  Clouds of yet another war appeared on the horizon.  The forces of the two countries were poised along the border.  But for the first time since 1947, sizeable lobbies against war came into action.  From April 1990 onwards, eminent Indians and Pakistanis comprising former ministers, retired judges, foreign secretaries, ambassadors, intellectuals, senior journalists and academics came out, against war in a series of statements in newspapers of both countries.  They spoke of conciliation rather than confrontation, of futility of armed conflicts and for resolution of disputes through discussions and negotiations.  Significant sections of the elites in the two countries abandoned the traditional posture of confrontation.

Some of the signatories of the Pakistani statement raised the level of their campaign and decided to meet their counterparts in India and leaders in Indian government and politics.  Eqbal Ahmad, Nisar Osmani, Asma Jahangir, Nasim Zehra and this writer arrived in New Delhi on 27 May.  It was a private visit, the first ever of its kind.  In four days stay, the delegation met with Inder Kumar Gujral, Minister for External Affairs, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and had fifteen sessions with well known organisations and addressed one public meeting.  The enthusiasm shown in New Delhi to meet the peace mission from Pakistan was overwhelming.  The leading national newspaper of Pakistan, Dawn of 5 June, 1990 said of our visit “The discussions were held in cordial atmosphere each side appearing to be keen to learn and communicate…. The participants on both the sides were of the opinion that wars in the past had served no purpose and an armed conflict in the future would be disastrous.  They believed that the governments should go to the negotiating table with a will to achieve peace and normalcy.  But this is where the agreement seemed to come to an end.”

In 1992, a galaxy of the elites of two countries, comprising 30 Indians and 29 Pakistanis issued a joint statement asking the two countries to move towards “an era of sustained peace and cooperation based on a firm commitment to resolve all outstanding disputes through negotiations”.  It demanded the ending of arms race and urged increasing exchange between people to improve the environment for meaningful negotiations.

The High Commissioner (Ambassador) for India in Pakistan, S. K. Lambah wrote to this writer:

“1.  I have just received your letter dated August 4 and want to thank you for sending me the statement on Peace and Cooperation issued by 59 eminent Indians and Pakistanis which was released by you in Lahore on August 2.

“2. The Government of India is committed to improve relations with Pakistan and I want to assure you that we would like to put into effect the suggestions made by the eminent personalities in both the countries.

There was no stopping the peace activists in the years to come.  In 1994 a group of Indians and Pakistanis met in Lahore and founded Pakistan – India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy.  They agreed:

1. That war and attempts to create war hysteria should be outlawed;

2. That a process of de-nuclearisation and reversal of the arms race should be started;

3. That Kashmir not merely being a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan, a peaceful democratic solution of it involving the peoples of Jammu and Kashmir is the only way out;

4.  That religious intolerance must be curbed as these tendencies create social strife, undermine democracy and increase the persecution and oppression of disadvantaged sections of society;

The first convention of the Forum was fixed for 24 and 25 February, 1995 in New Delhi.  Never had such a delegation of independent minded persons ever sought visas in such a large number.  With breath held they waited for the word from the Indian High Commission in Islamabad.  Hardly anyone believed that the visas would come.  But come they did, barely two days before the date of departure.  Some Pakistanis vociferously opposed the visit.  Editorials filled with venom appeared against the Pakistani participants as also statements of some national leaders condemning the visit and demanding the government stop it.  Regardless, more than seventy reached Delhi to meet one hundred from India.

The convention unanimously adopted some key recommendations relating to resolution of disputes without war, balanced reduction of armed forces, restraint on nuclear weapons, concluding their own test-ban-treaty, solution of the Kashmir question in accordance with the wishes and aspirations of the Kashmiri people and a detailed one on religious tolerance.

Under the title Ray of Sunshine, eminent Indian journalist Nikhil Chakravaratty wrote in his weekly Mainstream, New Delhi, of March 4, 1995:  “In short we may venture to say that while at the official level the governments of the two countries have been drifting to an eyeball-to-eyeball acrimony, the popular mood is veering towards a relationship of friendly neighbourhood.”

200 hundred Pakistani and Indian delegates attended the 2nd convention held in Lahore, Pakistan the same year.  In 1996, more than 300 Pakistanis and Indians met in Kolkata, India, for the Third Convention of the Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy.  The 4th joint Convention of Pakistan‑India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy was held at Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1998.  When some Indian delegates expressed the desire to visit the Khyber Pass, famous for the resistance put up by Afghan warriors against the British forces, they were told by the Pakistani hosts it was not possible.  They had no visas for the visit and even Pakistanis needed a special permit to go beyond a certain point on the Khyber-Kabul road.  But the Indians were not deterred.  They made it.  “How did you manage that?” they were asked.  “No problem.  We just went to the authorities and they issued us the permit” was their reply.  This was the way for the local administration to show hospitality to the Indian visitors regardless of the prevailing rules and regulations.  Since then, more conventions have been held at Banglore, India, Karachi, Pakistan and New Delhi.

The activism shown by the people and sections of the elites had visible impact on the governments of India and Pakistan by the mid-nineties.  One after another Indian prime minister publicly declared that progress and prosperity of Pakistan was in India’s interest.  These declarations had salutary effect in Pakistan where many had believed that India still had not accepted the partition of the country in 1947.  Finally the two governments concluded that their overt contact with the leaders of the other country will not have a negative backlash on their voters, that it was no longer possible to attract votes in elections by rhetoric against the other country.

In his election campaign in 1996, the leader of the opposition in Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif openly declared that if elected he would try to improve relations with India.  He went on to win the elections.  He and Prime Ministers Atal Bihari Vajpayee met at a historic summit meeting in February 1999.

Within months of the Indian prime minister’s visit, fierce skirmishes took place in the Kargil area along the Line of Control.  It was a rash attempt by confrontationists on the Pakistani side to torpedo the peace process.   In October, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government was overthrown.  The Chief of Army Staff  General Pervez Musharraf assumed power.  The Pakistani general was his country’s army chief at the time of the bloody Kargil skirmishes with Indian forces.  Indians considered him as the person responsible for the Kargil war.

Despite the roadblock created by Kargil, the compulsion of their high interests forced the two states to make another attempt at advancing the peace process begun at Lahore two years earlier.  President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister of India, Atal Bihari Vajpayee met at Agra in July 2001.  They agreed on an agenda for future meetings.  This time it was the turn of the confrontationists on the Indian side to torpedo the peace process.  The jointly prepared draft of communiqué could not be issued as the Indian prime minister could not secure the approval of his senior colleagues sitting in the adjacent room.  The Agra summit did not come up to the expectations of the peace campaigners but they pressed on their mission with great zeal.  Women, journalists, parliamentarians and retired generals in large numbers were conspicuous additions to their ranks during this period.

The peace process was yet to receive another severe jolt.  In October, 2001, Pakistan put its armed forces on high alert following the reported movement of Indian troops near its border. In December, the Indian Parliament was attacked by a group of terrorists. India blamed a terrorist outfit based in Pakistan for the attack and brought armies on Pakistan border and mounted a huge propaganda war.  The media in the West estimated that a million soldiers were called to battle stations on both sides of the Line of Control in Kashmir and on the entire length of Pakistan-India border.  Rail, road, and air communications were snapped.  The High Commissioners (ambassadors) were withdrawn.  The peace process suffered a major setback.  The two countries closed all doors and windows.  One could travel to the other country only by air via Dubai or Colombo by a flight four times more expensive.

My personal difficulties were also abnormal.  Barring an official or two my communication with General Musharraf’s government was mostly through statements or articles carried by the press, whereas ministers and prime ministers in India had always been gracious to find time to meet with me.  The setback had snapped my contacts.  In September 2003, when no minister or high official in New Delhi was ready to meet me, I sought a meeting with two persons who had access to the Indian prime minister.  They graciously obliged.  I put to them that the next general elections in India were to take place within a year or so and normalization of relations with Pakistan would help the prime minister and his party to secure more votes.  I requested them that if they could to tell me just one measure they would like Pakistan to take in the interest of peace.  I could then go and ask Islamabad the same question.  We could then break-up the measures into steps, 1, 2, 3; Pakistan could take step 1, followed by India’s step one and so on.

Their reply was point blank.  India did not trust Pakistan; there was no way it could talk to Pakistan.  Again and again I pleaded that I was not asking for the resumption of any negotiations, that I had no mandate to speak for the government of Pakistan and I had not talked to anyone in Pakistan about this question.  Finally, after a very long discussion lasting several hours, they relented and said, “India wants Pakistan to stop cross-border terrorism”.  After further discussion, “cross-border terrorism” was broken up into three steps: (1) do not give covering fire to infiltrators, (2) close down training camps, (3) stop equipping infiltrators with weapons and cash.  Satisfied, I returned to Pakistan.

In Islamabad I called upon a top government official and asked him the same question that was put to my Indian friends a week earlier.  He was interested in the question but reluctant to speak.  I pleaded before him that I was not speaking on behalf of India and I would not speak to anyone in India on behalf of Pakistan.  My question to him as a citizen of Pakistan was “could he tell me just one measure that Pakistan would want India to take in the interest of peace”.  Finally, he said “Pakistan wants India to come to the negotiating table”.  I told him that his answer was too general in nature, if only he could tell what verifiable concrete military, civil or political measures he would like India to take.  He promised to consider the question.

After a few weeks I had to go to Delhi  for work connected with Pakistan-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy.  As usual I put in my request to meet with ministers and high officials and was pleasantly surprised that my request for an interview was granted by a top official in the Indian prime ministers office.  He received me with some enthusiasm.  He said that in addition to what I had been told earlier, India also wanted Pakistan to stop directing the attacks on targets in Kashmir through wireless communication.  I was happy that official notice had been taken of my earlier discussions.  Meanwhile, the Pakistanis gave no response but as it became known later, were quietly working on the proposal I had made.

November 23, 2003 was a happy day for the peoples of Pakistan and India when Prime Minister of Pakistan Zafarllah Khan Jamali announced, “Our armed forces deployed on the Line of Control in Kashmir have been ordered to observe complete ceasefire.  India reciprocated the measure of the ceasefire the next day.  These measures were taken without resuming of any formal negotiations.  Apparently some very welcome secret understanding had been reached.

President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Vajpayee met in Islamabad on January 6, 2004 and laid the foundations for the current stage of the peace process.  Both sides yielded vital ground.  Pakistan declared that it will not allow its territory to be used by terrorists and India said that it was committed to find a solution of the Kashmir issue to the satisfaction of both the sides.  But the scope of the agreement proved to be greater than what was announced.  Next month, Pakistan and India announced a schedule for holding meetings of ministers and high officials to discuss all the issues: economic, political, cultural and defence related.  This was a giant step forward.

President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met again on April 2005. In a joint communiqué issued after their summit meeting, they declared: “Conscious of the historic opportunity created by the improved environment in relations and the overwhelming desire of the people of the two countries for durable peace and recognizing their responsibility to continue to move forward towards that objective, the two leaders had substantive talks on all issues,” the communiqué further said: “They determined that the peace process was now irreversible.” and that “In this spirit the two leaders addressed the issue of Jammu and Kashmir and agreed to continue these discussions in a sincere and purposeful and forward-looking manner for a final settlement. They were satisfied with the discussions and expressed their determination to work together to carry forward the process and to bring the benefit of peace to their people.”

The enthusiasm for peace and friendly relations shown by the peoples of India and Pakistan has left their governments far behind.  During the last eleven years, the trickle of peace activists crisscrossing the India-Pakistan border had assumed flood proportions.  The number of visas surpassed more than 10,000 per month.  The archives of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan record clippings of people-to-people contacts during 2004 covering 250 newspaper-size pages.  The masses of Pakistan and India are fully supportive of the peace process today and political leaders in both the countries are receiving the message.

Apart from the pressure of the overwhelming majority of the people on both governments there is yet another potent factor at work in support of the peace process.  While the United States reserves for itself the right to take aggressive military action against dissenting states, it along with western allies do not seem to want the same right to be exercised by states like India and Pakistan.  It does not want the two nuclear armed states to go to war.  Besides the strategic issue of breaking out of nuclear war, huge economic interests of the corporate world are involved.

During the last two decades the governments of Pakistan and India had been slowly yielding to the demands of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and had started shedding the traditional role of the state sector in their economies.  The governments of Pakistan opted for “privatization, deregulation and liberalization” in mid-eighties by appointing the well known World Bank man Dr Mahbubul Haq as its finance minister.  India followed by appointing Dr Manmohan Singh as finance minister in the early nineties.  The two countries have not looked back since then.  As a result the corporate sectors in the two countries have become immensely rich and influential and its links with the corporate world all over the globe are strengthening.

The industrial and finance capital owns the major chains of the print and electronic media in both the countries which sings praises of the market economy twenty-four of the day.  In India the two big political parties are mainly financed by rich industrialists and traders.  The prime minister of Pakistan is a former executive of Citibank.  Under the benevolent patronage of the world corporate sector, the big business in both the countries seems to have concluded that the dividend of peace between India and Pakistan can be far more for them than the dividends of political and military confrontation they had enjoyed earlier through protective economic regimes.  Securing for themselves the privilege of traveling between the two countries on multi-entry, non-police reporting visas – a privilege denied to the rest of the populace – they are quietly establishing business relations and promoting the efforts of promoting peace.  As a member of a political party with a socialist agenda I find it hard to collect Rs 10,000 a month to run a party office.  However, last October when I wrote seven letters to rich people in Pakistan asking for donations to help earthquake victims in India, five of them responded with a total donation of Rs five million.  In a similar vein we find it easy to collect donations to hold Pakistan-India peace conventions all over India and Pakistan.

The overwhelming support of the masses of the two countries for peace and friendship and the willingness of the political leaders to open doors of negotiations has given the peace process a roaring start to the extent that both President Pervez Musharraf and Prime minister Manmohan Singh have declared it “irreversible”.  The relations between Pakistan and India have never been as good as they are today.  The case for abolishing war on the subcontinent has gained immense strength.