The predominant emotion with which jingoistic Indians and Pakistanis view each others’ misfortunes is schadenfreude. They count each other’s conflicts and rebellions to keep score. The Indian will talk about sectarian violence in Pakistan, and the Pakistani will ask about the treatment of Dalits in India. The Pakistani will complain against Indian atrocities in Kashmir and the Indian will point fingers at Balochistan.

When I see such Indo-Pakistani interactions online, I am reminded of these words:

Dushman mare te khushi na karey

Sajna vi mar jaana

(Rejoice not the death of the enemy

The beloved may also die)

Those stark words are from Mian Muhammad Bakhsh’s most famous book of poems, Saiful Maluk. Bakhsh (1830-1907) was a Sufi pir and poet from Mirpur in modern-day Azad Kashmir, though his ancestors hailed from the Gujrat district in Pakistani Punjab. Known in Pakistan as Rumi-e-Kashmir, I learnt about Bakhsh from a friend who hails from Poonch on the Indian side of the Line of Control. My friend grew up literally on the border which is not a border, watching Doordarshan and PTV alike, making him a bit of an Indian and a bit of a Pakistani.

Culturally, my friend feels close to Kashmir but also to Punjab. Bakhsh’s poetry sounds very Punjabi, but my friend tells me there’s a dispute over Bakhsh’s language. He wrote in Potwari (or Pothohari), Pahari and Punjabi, using words from different dialects so that everyone in his land could understand him, as they still do.

The dispute over which language Bakhsh wrote in should perhaps not be resolved. It is proof that the defining feature of the culture of his land is the intermingling of cultures. That, indeed, is also my culture. That is Southasia – our tongues and stories and folklores speak to each other, allowing a second-generation Punjabi ‘refugee’ like me to feel at home in north India.

I think about this, and then I think about the Indians and the Pakistanis, bearers of artificial identities barely 65 years old, who score points against each other on Twitter, and I wonder if the absurdity of their war ever strikes them? Do they wonder if the legacy of Mian Muhammad Bakhsh is Indian or Pakistani? When the Indian points to the plight of Pakistani Hindus does he realise, for even a moment, the pain of Indian Muslims? What do they think nationalism means for a Sikh whose holiest shrines are in Pakistan? Do they not see the absurdity in taking hawkish positions regarding their own country while embracing the left-liberals and rebels of the ‘enemy’ country?

Hall of mirrors

People have had enough of repression and political manipulation. They want freedom. They assert their right to self-determination. They say they were never a part of your map. They want to make their own map. They take up arms against the state. The state responds with brutal repression. Men in uniform march down, take over the streets, bazaars and dreams. They make people disappear. Catch and kill. Kill and dump. They even get rewarded for doing so.

That could well be the story of Indian-administered Kashmir, except it is the story of Pakistan’s Balochistan region. As an Indian, the events in Balochistan pain me, not least because they remind me of everything that my government has been doing in Kashmir in my name.

One would have thought the Pakistani state would have learnt lessons not only from East Pakistan but also from the many insurgencies in neighbouring India, some of which it has helped foment. Reading the news from Balochistan is surreal, because it seems to be a carbon copy of Kashmir in the 1990s: missing persons, impunity, rebel-held territories. Even the discourse around the violence is familiar. Just as Kashmiris insist Kashmir was never a part of India, the Baloch insist Balochistan was never a part of Pakistan. Both conflicts stem from the messy history of Partition and the princely states, with post-colonial India and Pakistan both treating their provinces even more heavy-handedly than the British Raj did. Just as Indians blame Pakistan for the Kashmir rebellion, Pakistanis blame India for Balochistan. Just as Indians blame a few ‘separatist’ leaders to suggest that the Kashmiri rebellion is not a popular one, Pakistanis insist the problem in Balochistan only has to do with three tribal sardars.

There are of course many differences between Balochistan and Kashmir – to begin with, the territory of Balochistan is claimed only by one state, while Kashmir is claimed by two. The root cause of Baloch grievances is economic, where in Kashmir it is political. Yet the politics and economics of either place cannot be separated from core questions of identity. The Kashmiris assert that they are different from ‘Indians’ and the Baloch assert that they are different from ‘Pakistanis’. Kashmiris assert that their Central Asia-influenced culture, of which their Islam is an element, sets them apart from north India. The Baloch insist on their secularism and do not subscribe to the notion that Islam binds them to the Pakistanis. But in the way the two peoples articulate their struggles, and how the Pakistani and Indian states have decided that their only option is to militarily crush the rebellions, the similarities between the two conflicts outweigh the differences.

My Kashmiri friends don’t like Kashmir being compared to Balochistan. They point out that the status of Balochistan has never been disputed at the United Nations. For Kashmiris, Pakistan’s actions in Balochistan present a moral problem that is best avoided: how can we be counting on support from Pakistan while it does in Balochistan what India is doing in Kashmir? Looking at Southasia from Kashmir, this is not the first occasion that such questions have arisen: take, for instance, East Pakistan’s blood-soaked transformation into Bangladesh. Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the only credible and respected Kashmiri nationalist leader left, is said to have made it clear to Pakistan (albeit privately) on more than one occasion that it must put its own house in order in Balochistan. That, however, does not translate into supporting the Baloch people’s right to self-determination.