#KnowYourNeighbour: In Talks with Fawzia Naqvi

Do tell us something about yourself for the benefit of our audience.

I am New Yorker born in Pakistan. I am the daughter of two people who experienced the partition. My mother was from Agra and my father is from Amroha. I grew up on stories of my parents’ lives in India, and of course, the deep trauma of the partition. I was born in Mangla, which is very close to the Kashmir border and went to India for the first time in 1979 crossing the border at Wagha and, what an experience that was! I wrote about it in my essay called “A tale of Two Passports, the Year 1979, and Walking to India,” published in Kafila.

I live and work in New York and I have been covering India for the last 9 years for my current job. So, it’s my career which has given me the opportunity to go back and forth to India. It has been quite a journey so to speak and I have had the opportunity to travel in southern as well as northern India and has made visiting my ancestral towns possible. My maternal grandmother and my paternal grandfather were buried in India. So, you can imagine, this is no ordinary relationship I have with India. It is multifaceted and it is deep. And I am very proud and very content that through my work I have actually contributed to the well-being of India.

I have been deeply committed to Indo-Pak peace and I hope I have served as somewhat of an ambassador in this respect. I think I may be one of the few Pakistani women who have served as a shareholder for Indian investments. A real privilege and place of pride for me. But sadly I had to go all the way to the U.S to be able to do this work in India and even then getting a visa is a herculean undertaking and I have had to deploy all my networks and relationship skills to ensure I was able to do my job and stay engaged in what I felt was a true labor of love. I wrote a humorous piece about this in Kafila called, “Why is Sachin Pilot in my Dreams, Or, Three Visas and No More to India.” It was my way of coping.

I met a Brazilian lady the other day, and she told me how she found it bizarre that one has to answer if her grandparents were from Pakistan in order to apply for an Indian visa. I won’t even tell you what my Iraqi colleague had to endure for an entire year because the Indian consulate refused to believe he wasn’t of Pakistani heritage. It’s obscene. I can’t find another word for it. And I am sure Indians applying for Pakistan visa can share some stories of their own.

Do you think we are still connected through our lifestyle and love for food? Tell us something about your experiences.

My experience is that we are very much connected not only through lifestyle and food but through almost every other facet. We are literally connected by land mass and joined at the hip so to speak. But we are connected through language, religion, sights, smells, pathos, mythologies, music, literature, film, poetry, food, idioms, idiosyncrasies, clothes, families, and yes our prejudices, vices and bad habits. We are connected through so much good but a whole lot of bad behavior as well. And ultimately we are connected through our shared history which is the cataclysm of Partition. I cannot think of two more connected and yet forcibly disconnected peoples and places than India and Pakistan. After all the original entity called India is what is today’s Pakistan! And in so many ways each other’s soil is sacred ground.

I think what I hear in India most often is “Fawzia, but you understand us.” And yes, I am never a foreigner in India I am very much considered part of that land. In South India I am often taunted as being North Indian and I am teased about always wanting to only be in Delhi, which by the way is not true; I love being in South India.

And as someone once said to me, Pakistan is not a foreign policy issue for India; it is a domestic policy issue. And that really comes home to me when I hear entrepreneurs in India lament that it’s absurd that there is this border which suddenly blocks them from selling their products or ideas to 200 million Pakistanis. A logistics trucking company should be able to carry product from one end of India to the other end of Pakistan and vice versa. Mercifully, ideas are carried seamlessly bypassing physical borders.

In your opinion, how can India and Pakistan benefit from each other?

Oh my, how can they not benefit from each other? Where does one begin? Unfortunately so much brain power is being expended on how not to benefit from each other than the opposite and I have to wonder if either country can afford this high luxury of conflict, bureaucracy and Kafkaesque rules preventing us from even meeting each other.

I guess, in order to keep it brief, let me focus on my area of expertise. India and Pakistan are blessed with young and innovative and energized people. I know for a fact that young Pakistani entrepreneurs can benefit greatly from so many business models being created in India and vice versa. I often find myself saying, oh goodness your twin is sitting across the border and wondering how to make the introductions. There is a palpable energy and I wish so much to be able to throw open the real and virtual borders so that these young people can engage and share what they are building. Of course the online world has really been a game changer in that way, but there is no substitute for face to face meetings and honestly seeing is believing. I have personally tried to introduce Pakistani entrepreneurs to similar companies in India and we can’t even quantify really what the potential would be if there were freer movement of people and product and ideas across borders. But, because I am often in the thick of these exchanges, I can tell you that we could be an unstoppable powerhouse of a region just on the energy and drive of our young people coming together and collaborating.

The other great benefit I think is to civil society and activists sharing ideas about expanding civic space for the greater good of our societies and our region. The collective danger is regressive forces and closing spaces for civic engagement by citizens. Together we could truly create open societies for South Asia and how wonderful that would be for the next generation. Sadly, in both countries, there seems to be an effort to clamp down on those who want to engage in civic action or question decisions our governments are making on our behalf. It’s even sadder because both countries are democracies, but they seem more afraid of their own people than even each other. Not sure what that indicates, but it worries me greatly.

But like I said, the benefits are probably unquantifiable. To harness the potential of over one billion people! The converse of this is to squander this benefit all these years and pretty much into the foreseeable future. How have we, the people, allowed this? The cost of conflict and closed borders is mounting and now unquantifiable too.

How do you think your trip to India has helped you break stereotypes?

I think because I have lived outside of Pakistan and in New York all these years I have had the benefit of knowing many Indian friends. India therefore, for me has not been a mystery, nor have Indians.

I have to say though what surprised me about India is how insular India is. The world outside seems not to matter. I suppose it is because of its vastness and the myriad issues Indians deal with inside their own country. But what I find curious and at times alarming is how little Indians seem to know about Pakistan. And therefore, I find it absolutely mission critical to explain and demystify Pakistan in any which way I can when I visit India and people ask me about Pakistan. As you can imagine, once business is over or even during meetings I am often asked about Pakistan because it’s rare for Indians living in India to meet a Pakistani and also many have a mental model of what a Pakistani woman should look like or be like and I think I defy that and break that myth.

I will say though, I do think food is better in Pakistan, and I have eaten all over India now. My colleagues seem to derive great joy telling maître de’s of hotels and restaurants that a Pakistani is in the house and therefore the food better be good and inevitably the chef comes out to seek my opinion. I love it!!

And yes, if you haven’t seen Lahore you haven’t lived. It is truly the jewel of South Asia. But, of course, I am biased.

What have your experiences taught you about the other country?

There is much we can learn from India and we better get on with doing so.

How can we, as citizens, initiate friendly relations between the two countries?

Talk to each other; keep finding ways. If physical borders get in the way find virtual means to engage.

The other thing I want to say- let us be honest about the terrible things happening inside of our own countries. Lord knows Pakistan has enough ill to last us for another couple of generations. As does India, there are extremely disturbing things happening inside of India which don’t behoove the world’s largest democracy, because I firmly believe that as India goes, so goes the region. And really do you want to emulate some of the terrible things Pakistan has gotten up to? Which reminds me of Fehmida Riaz’s seminal verse “tum bhi hum jaise niklay..” (you too have turned out to be just like us).

Let us be able to talk about Kashmir, AFSPA, Baluchistan, Jihad Inc., how we treat minorities, women. Let us be able to have an honest discussion about these thorny issues, because if we don’t we are condemning our next generations to conflict, strive and perhaps even nuclear Armageddon. Why on earth are we assuming it can’t happen?

Hope that last sentence is frightening enough!

In your opinion, how is social media playing a role in bridging the gap between the two countries?

It is currently the nightmare of spooks and in North Block Delhi and Ministry of Interior in Islamabad. They simply cannot stop us from talking, meeting over Skype or Facetime, Whatsapp. Their red lines get a little fuzzy and messy now, which also makes life more difficult for ordinary citizens as authorities see “national security threats” under every rock and in every tweet or post. And the Indian or Pakistani hand is literally now in every Indian or Pakistani hand via smart phones. Must be very difficult being a modern day spy. Which reminds me- why don’t we have really great spy novels about India and Pakistan?

The good news is, however, that we read each other’s tweets and Facebook posts. We are literally in each other’s faces all the time and that is just wonderful. And, on occasion, we even fall in love! The horror!

But while social media is bridging the gap, it’s not enough. Physical borders must be opened up. Visas must be issued more liberally to tourists and to business people. There is no other way to normalize relations unless our embassies and consulates stop becoming fossilized and ossified gate keepers of the worst kind. The trauma I suffer each time I must apply for a visa even as an American citizen is unimaginable, and why? Believe me it is not easy for the Indian consulate staff either. They really don’t enjoy telling me “it’s your place of birth only, madam.” Something they have to do even though they’ve dealt with me for years now.

Your message for war mongers?

Dear War Mongers,

Please download an app called Patari. Patari is Pakistan’s version of Spotify, only better because its all Pakistani music, new and old and everything in between. So it’s like chai and samosas on a monsoon day in Lahore or Delhi. Incredibly yum and blissful. They have a song for all your impulses. You will love it- guaranteed. And you might particularly want to listen to a song called “Bandook” (gun) by SomeWhatSuper, and be inspired to put down that Bandook and start dancing to this fabulous cheeky song.

The final thing I want to say to war mongers is NOT IN MY NAME.