On the other hand, once you ask them about concrete situations, people and policies, you realise how far they have moved from the spirit of 1971. The idea of a war as the final solution of Indo-Pak disputes is completely rejected on both sides of the border. There is an overwhelming support for putting the past behind and building a friendly relation in the future. And this is no abstraction. There is virtually a consensus across the border that the people-to-people contact should be encouraged, that visa regimes should be relaxed and that Indo-Pak trade should be increased. If you thought all this was easy, just think of this: as many as three-fourth of the respondents in both the countries agreed with the proposition that the nuclear race was pointless, now that both the countries have exploded their bombs. Except a tiny minority, urban Indians and Pakistanis are convinced that the relations between the two countries are going to improve in the years to come.

Yet this is not the real measure of the growing Indo-Pak relationship. Citizens on both sides of the border are learning to explore each other in domains other than politics. Pakistani love of Mumbai cinema, Indian love of Pakistani ghazals and their mutual obsession with each other’s cricketers is too well known to need the statistics thrown up by this poll. But the extent of the desire to visit the other country — every two in five Indians and Pakistanis express this desire — is less understood. Interestingly, the places people wish to visit most are not the shared symbols of our old and shared traditions — Agra, Ajmer Sharif, Taxila or Nankana Sahib — but the modern urban centres like Delhi, Mumbai, Lahore and Karachi. Perhaps this symbolises the desire to search for roots not in the past but in the contemporary and the future. One can detect a similar preference at work in their choice of icons. The political icons of the twentieth century — Jinnah, Nehru and even Gandhi — continue to divide the people in the two countries. What unite them are the cultural icons from cinema, music and cricket.

... contd.