At a time when cynicism about the media is at an all-time high, and when war-mongering has become an almost daily routine for media in India and Pakistan, media behemoths in the two countries have taken a small but welcome step on the first day of the new year to reduce the sabre-rattling.
While most newspapers were content with dishing out the predictable January 1 stuff, The Times of India has embarked on a “brave, new people-to-people initiative” in association with Pakistan’s No.1 media house, the Jang Group, to bring the people of the two nations together.
Titled Aman ki Asha, ToI has a provocative, almost unthinkable, headline on its wraparound: “Love Pakistan”.
Seminars, cultural interactions, business seminars, music and literary festivals and citizens meets are on the anvil “to give the bonds of humanity a chance to survive outside the battlefields of politics, terrorism and fundamentalism.”
The Times of India‘s editor Jaideep Bose writes:
“We believe the media can serve as facilitators in fostering greater understanding between people. Unfortunately — and TOI cannot entirely escape blame — we tend to focus far too much on the negative. In the process, the good that people do is drowned out by the sensational, and by the constant flow of deathand-destruction headlines.”
Gibran Peshimam writes on the Geo TV site:
“Aman ki Asha will look to inject impetus into the Indo-Pak dialogue in a manner that is unparalleled, on a scale that is unprecedented.”
Visit the Times microsite: Aman ki Asha
Visit the Jang microsite: Aman ki Asha
Also read: The Times of India discovers peace
IJR 
[…] Serif reports that two media giants – Jang from Pakistan and The Times of India from India – have joined hands in […]
The Indian government offered the hand of peace to Pakistan on several occasions. Most of the time, a soldier, a man of war, was at the helm in Pakistan and he never took his hand out of his pocket. When the war that gave birth to Bangladesh ended, India repatriated thousands of Pakistani soldiers unconditionally and did not bother to set up its hegemony there. I do not want to refer to the happy status of Muslims in India which is one way of showing to others that we are generous to Muslims because they are Muslims and not Indians. Still, it is important to mention that there is not a single top post in the country that a Muslim has not graced, from the President of India to the Chief Justice of India, from captains of cricket and hockey to the heroes and heroines of the film industry, from Bharat Ratna Bismillah Khans to Parveen Sultanas, from Seema Mustafas to M.J.Akbars in journalism, not to mention Razia Ismail, Syeed Naqvi and others..
The burden of e peace-initiative is not on the Indian side. Not that we don’t want peace. It is the political fashion in the English media to light candles, form human chains, hold seminars etc to show to the world that the Indian language media, by not imitating them, are run by a tribe of war mongers.
B.G.Verghese did his best in the Indian Express to equate India with Pakistan in the matter of peace overtures. But I am troubled by a question: What about peace at home? Who are the English media stars who toiled day and night to keep the fires of hatred burning in Gujarat? Why did the English media doves like B.G.Verghese, Dileep Padgaonkar (the Times of India, (aman ki asha sponsor) and IPI award winner Shekhar Gupta (for Gujarat reporting) fly to Pakistan in the aftermath of the riots? Did they believe that what happened to Muslims in Gujarat is compulsive concern for Muslims in Pakistan? We have English columnist who have coined terms like Muslim Indians and Christian Indians suggesting that these two communities consider themselves as members of their faith first and that for them India comes only after faith.
Gujarat reporting, a synonym for fiction in English media, has done 100 times greater damage to communal peace than Modi has ever done. Ten years after Gujarat, the English media continue to inflate a small incident in Gujarat into a national calamity. Such things happen every day in Hyderabad. Peace initiative from Jang (WAR)? TheTimes of India, betraying its film and cricket constituency, has discovered that the Indo-Pak peace initiative is a nonstarter at the government level and the media must step in and play the same Gujarat mischief. Enough of these gimmicks.
Krishnmaoorty .