Indians writing about living in Pakistan is an established sub-genre dating back to the immediate aftermath of partition and each decade thereafter has seen a fresh crop of books of analysis and semi-autobiographical narratives. This field is necessarily populated thickly by diplomats and journalists. In these accounts the particular conjuncture that Pakistan was at then and its relations with India at the time obviously loom large. But other issues have almost uniformly interested each of these authors: namely the curious amalgam of familiarity and difference; and the mix of antagonism and friendly curiosity that Pakistanis present to Indians.
Kesava Menon’s Never Tell Them We Are the Same People: Notes on Pakistan is firmly in this tradition but with one important difference. He has written this account some three decades after his assignment to Pakistan as The Hindu’s correspondent from mid-1990. So, these memories, anecdotes and analyses are tempered by reflections on what has changed both in India and in Pakistan in the intervening period. The long gap, Menon writes, “seems appropriate”; not so long “that memories have faded into soft sepia” but the “distancing in time has probably helped the attainment of better balance”.
Benazir Bhutto of the Pakistan People’s Party and Nawaz Sharif of the Pakistan Muslim League meet for a discussion at Sharif’s home in London, on April 24, 2006. | Photo Credit: Reuters
Different strands
Menon’s time in Islamabad — his tenure began in July 1990 — had as its domestic backdrop the heightened political strife so characteristic of post-Zia Pakistan with the army playing off the Pakistan People’s Party against the Pakistan Muslim League and a new generation of Pakistan leaders in the form of Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto battling it out. Blow back from post-Soviet Afghanistan saw the emergence of the cocktail, which has become synonymous with Pakistan, of sectarianism, militancy and drugs. On the India-Pakistan front, the continued impact of the Khalistan troubles, the more serious insurgency in Kashmir and the demolition of the Babri Masjid meant a largely familiar static position and the absence of anything remotely resembling a less tense bilateral relationship.
People in Ramanathapuram observe Babri Masjid demolition anniversary. | Photo Credit: L. Balachandar
Menon’s experience of living in Pakistan for an Indian follows the prevalent narratives about life for Indians in Pakistan (and vice-versa, at least to an extent): “A subliminal dread never leaves the Indian living in Pakistan”. He also recalls as he finally exited the Pakistan International Airlines aircraft on landing in India, the feeling of “of a weight being lifted off my shoulders”. You also get a sense of how difficult it was for an Indian journalist to operate in an evidently hazardous environment. Yet even in an ecosystem generally hostile, there were still spaces where Indian reporters could function effectively and numerous individuals who encouraged such functioning.
The experience of living and working in Pakistan for an extended period for any Indian involves interfacing with a range of issues quite regardless of who you are or when you lived there. Menon thus also confronts mutually contradictory readings of history and diametrically opposed positions on Kashmir. Alongside there are the eternal and inconclusive debates over “partition as tragedy” or “partition as liberation”. Then there is inevitably the Pakistan army — and Menon usefully speculates whether it sees itself as an intellectual cum warrior elite rolled into one — “Do they see themselves as Janissaries or Mamlukes”.
This book is a readable and closely written account of an exciting tenure in Pakistan plus a reflection on Pakistan’s evolution in the past three decades and a wealth of anecdotal details of different experiences and situations.
Never Tell Them We Are the Same People: Notes on Pakistan; Kesava Menon, Speaking Tiger Books, ₹399.
The reviewer is a former High Commissioner to Pakistan.
