India-Pakistan Tensions Too Deep for Nobel Prize Alone to Solve
Malala Yousafzai, 17, became the first teenager to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, announced today by the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo. Photographer: Andrew Burton/Getty Images
Yesterday morning, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said India’s military had shut up Pakistan’s army during the deadliest week of fighting in more than a year. A few hours later, he congratulated citizens from both countries who shared a Nobel Peace Prize.
In splitting the award between Indian child rights activist Kailash Satyarthi and Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel committee weighed in on decades of animosity between nuclear-armed neighbors holding a fifth of the world’s population. Analysts aren’t expecting much to change.
“It’s all very well for do-gooder Scandinavian types to try to nudge them together, but it’s not going to mean much,” said Burzine Waghmar, a member of the South Asia Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. “It’s just symbolic, with protocol gestures.”
The award came during a week in which Hindu-majority India and Muslim-dominated Pakistan traded blame for tit-for-tat gunfire that killed at least 14 people, including civilians, in the disputed region of Kashmir. The two sides stopped firing at each other last night, the Times of India reported today, citing India’s Border Security Force Director General D.K. Pathak. The two nations have fought three of their four wars since partition in 1947 over Kashmir, which is divided between them and claimed in full by both.
Yousafzai yesterday said she would like both Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Modi to attend the award ceremony for the peace prize in Oslo on Dec. 10.
“We want India and Pakistan to have good relations, and the tension that is going on is really disappointing,” Yousafzai said in Birmingham, England. “It’s very important that the countries have peace. This is how they are going to progress,” she said.
Hindu, Muslim
“The Nobel Committee regards it as an important point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism,” it wrote yesterday while declaring the winners of the annual prize in Oslo, Norway. Past recipients included Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Barack Obama.
Yousafzai, 17, became the first teenager to win the prize, a recognition of her efforts to combat extremism after Taliban militants shot her in the face. Satyarthi, 60, is a children’s rights activist whose organization has rescued more than 80,000 children from bondage, trafficking and exploitative labor.
“Alone, Malala and Satyarthi are both great individuals whose work in education with young people links them,” Nikita Sud, an associate professor of development studies at the University of Oxford, said by phone. “But it’s too simplistic to boil down their identities to Hindus, Muslims, Indians and Pakistanis -- and makes them part of their national jingoism, which neither have chosen to do.”
‘Befitting Lesson’
The two countries experienced as many as one million deaths in 1947, when Hindus and Muslims were attacked while trying to cross a new border drawn in the wake of British rule. About 80 percent of India’s 1.2 billion people are Hindu and 13 percent are Muslim, according to the CIA World Factbook, while 97 percent of Pakistanis practice Islam.
Modi yesterday said India had taught Pakistan “a befitting lesson” during a week of fighting, Press Trust of India reported. Sharif sought to cool tensions after a meeting yesterday with the chiefs of armed forces and security advisers, saying that “war is not an option.”
“It is a shared responsibility of the leadership of both countries to immediately defuse the situation,” Sharif’s office said in a statement.
Malice
Since 1988, more than 14,000 Indian civilians and 6,000 security personnel have been killed in border violence, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, which doesn’t have similar figures for Pakistani deaths. Repeated acts of terrorism, including the 2008 attacks in Mumbai targeted at foreigners in luxury hotels, have also rankled ties between the two countries.
Matthew Nelson, who specializes on Pakistan at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, called the award “a very helpful move” that may provide an opportunity for Modi and Sharif “to appreciate one another’s countries publicly.”
While Modi congratulated both peace prize winners on Twitter yesterday, Sharif only feted Yousafzai in a text message to reporters from his office.
“It is a nice gesture, but I don’t think this will have any real impact,” said N. Bhaskara Rao, chairman of the Delhi-based Centre for Media Studies, about the peace prize. “This does reflect in the seriousness of the problem, but the malice between the two countries is too deep for such symbolism to carry much weight.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Kartikay Mehrotra in New Delhi at kmehrotra2@bloomberg.net
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