IN February, I published an article titled “A Diplomat in Pakistan”.
This is the second in the series. His writings are more apropos today as South Asia wrestles with the challenges of integration. To provide some context, in the past many months, I have been privileged to meet a diplomat whose good cheer and positivity make him easy to befriend. His South Asian heritage deepens these qualities further and having worked on Afghanistan, in Bangladesh and now in Pakistan, he cherishes and champions increased regional integration.
I am sharing his reflections on his regional postings — in his words, kept as true to the original as possible. He writes: The genuine warmth I’ve experienced as a diplomat in Pakistan compels me to address the barriers that divide the people of South Asia. There is an unaccounted-for opportunity cost in human connections, a consequence of the political divisions between the countries of South Asia, a cost that is borne most acutely by the people of the region and humanity writ large.
Anyone who has watched enough South Asian films knows an uncomfortable truth: the bitterest battles are fought within families, over shared and contested legacies. The dramatic tension comes not from fighting strangers but from conflicts between brothers, sisters and cousins over inheritance and belonging. The nations of modern South Asia are undeniably defined by a common colonial ancestry—mainly British. Today the regional rivalries are those of siblings and cousins, which we inherited. We need to be wiser than our ancestors and find a new narrative for the region—one where siblings learn to share the inheritance rather than destroy each other over it.
I recently saw Pakistan’s pride in its shared inheritance at Lok Virsa, Islamabad. The museum’s galleries devoted to musical traditions make the case more eloquently than any diplomat can. There, mounted on the wall, are traditional instruments labeled in both Urdu and English: the ektara—a simple stringed instrument that has carried melodies across the subcontinent for centuries. In a diorama nearby, a figure in the yellow robes of a Hindu pandit sits with a stringed instrument, labeled simply “Hindu Pandit Practicing Music.” The scene could be from anywhere in rural South Asia. But the most affecting display is a large panel on the gharanas—the traditional schools of classical music founded by great masters across cities that are now divided by an international border. Yet the musical traditions acknowledge no such division. Pakistani exponents of Hindustani classical music like Ustad Salamat Ali Khan learned their craft within these very systems.
Standing in that gallery, I thought about how a Hindu pandit practicing music and a Muslim ustad teaching ragas drew from the same wells of devotion and indigenous aesthetic philosophy. The instruments, ragas and teaching traditions belong not to one nation but to a civilization. Peshawar’s old city holds similar continuity: Shah Rukh Khan’s ancestral home in Qissa Khwani Bazaar, Dilip Kumar from Mohalla Khudadad and Raj Kapoor’s family roots all remain, though largely inaccessible to admirers. Yet these artists transcend borders with ease—Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s qawwalis in Delhi drawing rooms and Atif Aslam and Rahat Fateh Ali Khan shaping Bollywood anthems. An undeniable spirit of regional unity persists despite South Asia’s political borders.
The unfortunate divisions extend even to religious pilgrimage. The Kartarpur Corridor, opened in 2019, allows Indian Sikhs to visit one of their holiest sites just inside Pakistan without a full visa—but this remains an exception. Pakistan is home to dozens of sacred sites for Sikhs, Hindus and Buddhists. India hosts Muslim shrines and Sufi dargahs that Pakistani faithful wish to visit. Bangladesh contains Buddhist viharas and Hindu temples of historical importance. Religious tourism, which can link South Asia, remains constrained by visa restrictions and security concerns. What strikes me, having served in Dhaka and Mumbai and now in Pakistan, is how artificial these national divisions appear against the reality of internal diversity. The cultural distance between a Baloch shepherd in Quetta and a Muhajir businessman in Karachi is likely greater than the shared outlook between that Karachi businessman and his counterpart in Mumbai. A Tamil speaker in Jaffna shares more with Tamils in Tamil Nadu than with a Sinhala speaker in Colombo. Bengal was divided in 1947, but Kolkata and Dhaka share language, cuisine and literary traditions.
Nations have legitimate security interests and needs—this is not in question. But we must consider also the risk of excessively overestimating the threat posed by a neighbour, which creates an atmosphere of distrust. The threat becomes real partly because we treat it as inevitable. I think of this when I watch cricket, that great shared passion of the subcontinent. And imagine if South Asia could field a super team like that of West Indies, composed of the best players from multiple countries.
Which raises the question: how can sport and culture and music and food serve to once again link the people? The connections already exist, after all, flowing beneath the surface of official relations. They persist in despite political and national boundaries. The question is whether we can acknowledge them, nurture them and allow them to do the work that people-to-people ties have always done: creating webs of mutual interest and understanding that make conflicts harder to start and sustain. Let us see if our diplomatic friends voice echoes someday in the region.
—The writer is a former Senior Advisor to the Government and a sector development specialist. He is a member of the APP Think Tank and Pakistan’s Buddhist Heritage Promotion Ambassador for Green Tourism, a company under SIFC.
