Now that the official celebrations of nationhood are over, one can be forgiven for asking a provocative question: should we be celebrating nations and nationalisms in this part of the world? If you ask Ashis Nandy, perhaps the most notable dissenting voice of our times, the answer may be a resounding no. He believes that the idea of nation-state has led to more bloodbath and genocides in the twentieth century than both the world wars put together. For him, India and Pakistan are a prime example of how costly the western idea of nation-state has been for the human race.

The problem was not that Indians and Pakistanis did not wish to behave like good neighbours. The real trouble was that they do not know what it means to be neighbours, that they were still too involved with each other to act simply as neighbours. For most part of the last 60 years, Indians and Pakistanis behaved like two communities within the same country rather than citizens of two different countries in an international community of nation-states. Hence the baffling love-hate relationship that is so familiar to Indo-Pak encounters.

The Indian Express-Dawn News-CNN-IBN poll, the first-ever simultaneous Indo-Pak opinion poll, detected a subtle change in this complex and often schizophrenic attitude that the people on the two sides of this artificial border have displayed vis-à-vis each other. It finds them trying to share a present despite a divided past, struggling to find common symbols outside the contested political terrain, trying to invent roots for themselves in a possible future. They are learning to build a difficult relationship.

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