ISLAMABAD: Pakistani activist for female education and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai has said her dream was to see India and Pakistan become ‘true friends’.
While speaking an online session on her latest book titled “We Are Displaced: My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls Around the World,” on the last day of the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF), Malala said war isn’t known as a solution but rather it expands issues.
“It is my dream to see India and Pakistan become truly good friends,” Malala said in the session moderated by New Delhi-based editor and writer Pragya Tiwari. “You are Indian and I am Pakistani and we are entirely fine, then why is this hatred created between us?” she questioned.
“This old philosophy of borders, divisions and divide and conquer … they just don’t work anymore. As humans, we all want to live in peace,” the 32-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner said.
Relations between Pakistan and India have been shaped by a bitter enmity and fortified variance since the partition of British-ruled India into Muslim Pakistan and majority Hindu India in 1947.
On the other hand, the literary event is known as the “greatest literary show on Earth” welcomed Pakistani participants, who for its earlier editions faced difficulties in obtaining Indian visas.
The 14th edition of the Indian literary event that normally attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors to its venue in the 19th-century Diggi Palace Hotel in Jaipur on Sunday had among its speakers Douglas Stuart, the winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, and prominent American social scientist.
Besides Malala, the JLF sessions also welcomed novelists Moni Mohsin, H.M. Naqvi, and political scientist Ishtiaq Ahmed from Pakistan.
