Sharjah: A free flow of Pakistanis visiting India could restore trust between the peoples of the two rival countries after serial setbacks in peace talks, Indian author and politician Shashi Tharoor said during the Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF) on Saturday night.
Tharoor, 60, was responding to a question from the audience on the way forward after souring relations between the two neighbours, as well as between different communities within India.
Tensions between India and Pakistan — who have fought three wars with each other — have flared recently after exchanges of deadly fire along their border and spying scandals.
On Saturday, after placing all blame on Pakistani “betrayals” of India’s “peace initiatives”, Tharoor suggested “people to people contact” could help rebuild trust between them.
He said: “Having said that, my own view is that we can do something different … I would say: do enhance people to people contact; open up a generous policy with regard to visas for Pakistanis; encourage Pakistani movie stars who like to watch Indian movies, and Pakistani artists and singers and fashion designers and whoever else to come to India, get access to the Indian market and Indian audience; open up business opportunities [in India] for Pakistani businesses; because in this process, I believe, India’s soft power will work to its advantage to create more [well wishes] for us in Pakistan than we have thoroughly been able to enjoy in recent years, and certainly it will be the opposite of the current situation … That could be a way of building trust between the peoples of the two countries.”
Tharoor said: “Within India the story is very different”, stressing any “distrust” between religious communities has been “because of extremists on both sides who have said irresponsible things”.
He added: “Let me assure you, from my experience in India … I can say truthfully that there are far more people who believe in the coexistence and cooperation of different religious communities in India than those who would rather divide them and promote mistrust. So, I think on this one, the good guys are winning.”
Tharoor was at the SIBF for a Saturday night talk alongside his son Kanishk Tharoor — both are authors who launched the international release of their new books at SIBF. Shashi Tharoor launched An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, while Kanishk Tharoor launched Swimmer Among the Stars.
Tharoor said his book is about the “damage” done by the British Raj “who took over the richest country of the time [the Mughal Empire in India] and reduced it to the poorest”. He added that there is an element of “romanticised nonsense” in colonial British narratives of the era. “I can substantiate all claims in my book”, Tharoor said, adding it was “solidly based on documents”.
Kanishk Tharoor’s book is a collection of 13 short stories “with an overarching theme of how identifies shift in times of crisis”, such as an interview with the last speaker of a language that has fallen victim to a globalised world.
SIBF breaks own record of visitors
More than 650,000 visitors have attended the first four days of this year’s Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF) — a record in its 35-year history. The collected data indicates that the current edition of the 11-day fair, which began on November 2 and concludes on Saturday at Expo Centre Sharjah, will break the record for overall number of visitors at a single edition, surpassing even last year’s SIBF, which reached one million visitors by its close.
Ahmad Bin Rakkad Al Ameri, chairman of the Sharjah Book Authority (SBA), organisers of the annual SIBF, announced that the fair attracted approximately 655,000 from Wednesday to Friday — a figure that has broken the SIBF 2014 record of 520,000 visitors over the same period.
Al Ameri highlighted the factors he believed have played a key role in attracting a greater number of attendees to the fair this year, pointing to the UAE’s Year of Reading 2016 initiative and numerous other literary-themed campaigns.