In a thundering speech at Mumbai’s Observer Research Foundation (ORF), Hameed Haroon, the CEO of Pakistan’s Dawn Media Group, exhorted the people of India and Pakistan to bring down the metaphorical “Berlin Wall” that has arisen between the two nations since Independence.
But even his powerful words couldn’t capture the human cost of callous government policies quite like Fauzia Ansari’s trembling voice. Ansari, whose son went missing in Pakistan in 2012, attended the event to ask the media baron for help. “Can the media help to get my son back?” asked Ansari while struggling to hold back tears. “I sit on the web and write emails all day, but my voice is unheard.”
Haroon seemed sympathetic to the story of Ansari’s 26-year-old son, Hamid, who left home ostensibly to get a job in Kabul’s aviation sector but whose real motive was to help a young woman he had met online. According to his mother, he wanted to rescue her from a forced marriage in the tribal area of Kohat, and crossed over from Afghanistan to Pakistan. He’s been missing ever since and a Lahore journalist, who was investigating his case, has also been kidnapped.
“No mother should lose her son,” said Haroun after promising to get senior Pakistani journalists involved in the case. “I think hopefully he will be restored to you.” The hour-long talk titled, “India and Pakistan-Reconciliation through Rediscovery of the Shared Past,” was delivered amidst tight security at the ORF’s office, off Marine Drive.
The event went off peacefully; unlike the last time when Shiv Sainiks blackened the ORF chairman’s face ahead of a book launch by Pakistan’s former foreign minister, Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri. In his talk, Haroon explained that the two countries’ shared past dates back 9,500 years. He cited evidence unearthed at Mehrgarh, a Neolithic archaeology site in the Kachi district of Pakistan.
“We have seen invasions like the Taliban in South Asia before,” he told the crowd, “the reason we are not able to deal with it like even medieval governments could is because we stand disunited.” He added that Indian journalists had done a great disservice by downplaying the danger of the Taliban and that more people in India should be learning Dari and Pashto to meet this looming threat.
Haroon also spoke about the intellectual wall that had come down between the two countries in 1965, and the detrimental impact this had on academic research and displaced communities like Mumbai’s Sindhi community. “How can we wipe out our connections, our history, and our strands of interaction and pretend we were born 60 years ago?” he asked.
