Chandigarh, March 6 (IANS) A Pakistani delegation on a nine-day goodwill visit to India Friday said the youth of both the countries are yearning to drop all the past barriers and learn more about each other.
“We are the representatives of the people and do not stand for any state or religion. What we see about India through the media and what Indians see about us is just one percent of the reality,” Saeeda Diep told IANS here Friday.
“India is quite different from Pakistan. It is a secular state and world’s biggest democracy. However, there is no difference between the youth of the two countries. They are yearning to shed all barriers between them,” said Diep, who heads the Institute for Secular Studies in Lahore.
The peace delegation came to India March 1. It visited Amritsar, Delhi, Nagpur, Hyderabad, Chennai, Lucknow, Patna, Kolkata, Jaipur and Ajmer.
“We have to make our borders virtually irrelevant just like the European Union did after a long history of conflicts. Here we cannot rely solely on our policy makers but the masses of both countries have to come closer,” said Zulfiqar Shah, a journalist who writes for the Daily Dawn in Karachi.
Audho Khan Malik, advocacy manager of Action Aid Pakistan in Karachi, said: “There are only a certain section of people who are not allowing things to normalise. Even in some textbooks in Pakistan, we study that India was ruling Pakistan and we got freedom in 1947 that is totally baseless.”