Mango is known as the king of fruits in both India and Pakistan, where it is celebrated in poetry, has served as a tool of diplomacy and a symbol of status, and prominently features in culinary traditions.
There are more than 1,000 varieties of mango grown in India, differing in shape, color, flavor, texture and size. Soon, one more is going to join them. It will be called Dosti, or “friendship,” and is created from a mix of Pakistani and Indian fruit.
The mango tree is growing in Pune in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, planted by Nitin Sonawane, Yogesh Vishwamitra and Jalandharnath Channole — activists who preach Mahatma Gandhi’s principles of positive peacemaking and in 2022 spent almost a month in the Pakistani cities of Lahore and Karachi.
“When we were leaving Pakistan on Aug. 14, 2022, a friend Irshad Ahmad gave me a mango sapling. He said: ‘Carry this message of love from us’,” Vishwamitra told Arab News.
“We brought the sapling to Pune. On Aug. 22, 2022, we planted the sapling ... we were skeptical whether the plant will take roots or not. But it got new leaves and it spread wide. Then we decided to graft the mango tree with the Indian mango in January.”
Vishwamitra is a disciple of Satish Kumar, an Indian British nuclear disarmament advocate and former monk who walked more than 8,000 miles in the 1960s from New Delhi to Moscow, Paris, London and Washington, D.C. — the capitals of the world’s earliest nuclear-armed countries.
“My guru told me that if you want to do peace work you should walk in India as well as in each of the neighboring countries,” Vishwamitra said.
“I am lucky to have walked in Sri Lanka in 2016 and 2018, and in Pakistan in 2022, and 2023 in Bangladesh.”
He hopes that the Indian-Pakistani mango variety that he grows will, in the future, be grafted with Bangladeshi fruit and become a “living symbol of friendship.”
India, Pakistan and Bangladesh share decades of rivalry and violence stemming from the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, in which new borders drawn by British colonial officials created a Muslim majority in West and East Pakistan, and a Hindu majority in India.
The partition was one of the largest migrations in history, forcing about 15 million people to swap countries in a political upheaval that cost more than 1 million lives. Bitterness and hostility over the events remains to this day, especially in official relations, as in the years that followed the partition the countries also fought several wars.
India and Pakistan, especially, have become arch-rivals on the international stage — a condition that the three Indian activists believe does not reflect the real sentiment of people in the two countries.
For Sonawane, who has visited 50 countries since he left his engineering career in 2013 to focus on peace activism, the visit to Pakistan was particularly eye-opening.
“When we went to Pakistan people gave us so much love and care. We felt that the issue between India and Pakistan is not a people-to-people issue. It is more at the political level. It was a big learning experience for us,” he told Arab News.
“People supported us, they allowed shelter in their home, they offered food and took us around. They took care of us for 24 days.”
Through initiatives creating grassroots bonds, he hoped to make a change in relations between the countries. The Indian-Pakistani mango tree was a symbolic representation that it was possible.
“Mango marriage is a new hope,” Sonawane said. “The mango sapling is not just a biological plant or a botanical plant; it is a deep connection of love and compassion.”
(HATE)
A year after extremists forced Muslim neighbors from their homes in India, victims live in despair as their tormentors seek to drive Islam from what they consider a Hindu “holy land.”
Mohammad Salim shudders when he remembers the campaign that erupted in May 2023 against his Muslim minority community in Purola, a seemingly sleepy town surrounded by forested hills in the northern state of Uttarakhand.
“If I had not escaped that day, they would have killed me along with my family,” said Salim, 36, a married father of three young daughters.
Salim, whose clothes shop was looted, now lives in basic accommodation with his family around 100 kilometers (60 miles) away in the city of Haridwar, struggling to make ends meet.
Rakesh Tomar, 38, is one of those who celebrated his departure.
The hard-line Hindu nationalist activist, based in state capital Dehradun, spouts hate-filled rhetoric against a minority he feels threatens him.
“Uttarakhand is the holy land of Hindus,” Tomar said, referring to the shrines around the sacred headwaters of the Ganges river in the state, an area larger than Switzerland.
“We will not let it become an Islamic state under any circumstances, even if we have to sacrifice our lives for it.”
Only 13 percent of Uttarakhand’s 10 million people are Muslim, according to the last census in 2011.
Much of the hatred last year was fueled by “love-jihad” conspiracies, claiming predatory Muslim men wanted to seduce Hindu women to convert them.
Crude but effective, they are shared widely online, poisoning centuries of relative harmony in the area.
Many were shared by activists like Tomar, supporters of the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The BJP’s nationalist rhetoric has left India’s Muslim population of more than 220 million fearful for their future. The BJP denies it is anti-Muslim.
Tomar sees himself on a frontline to stop what he alleges are Muslim efforts to take trade from Hindu businesses.
“We have started an initiative where Hindu shopkeepers put nameplates outside their shops so that Hindus buy goods from them,” he said.
“This economic boycott will curb ‘trade jihad’ waged by Muslims.”
It is a tried and tested tactic.
In Purola last year, the attacks on Muslims were preceded by a poster campaign plastered on Muslim homes and businesses telling them to leave.
Crowds demanded the “forced migration of Muslims” out of Purola, where some 500 Muslims had made up five percent of an otherwise Hindu town of some 10,000 people.
At first, Salim thought he would be safe.
He had been born in the town — his father moved there half a century ago — and was old friends with his Hindu neighbors.
He was also a local leader of the BJP’s Minority Front — non-Hindu supporters of the party.
But months of online hate speech had divided old friends.
“I was threatened with death,” Salim said, adding his shop was looted and the building vandalized — losing assets he totalled at some $60,000.
“People said, ‘You should leave the town quickly or these people will kill you’.”
He and his family fled that night, among some 200 other Muslims driven out. Only a few have returned.
Tomar, a full-time activist who heads a self-described anti-Islam “army” of several hundred men, believes his Muslim neighbors are conspiring to seize Hindu women, land and businesses — none of which he can provide evidence to justify.
He spoke to AFP on a break from a meeting of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), whose millions of members conduct paramilitary drills and prayer meetings.
The RSS campaigns for India to be declared a Hindu nation — rather than a secular one, as enshrined in its constitution — and is the ideological parent of Modi’s BJP.
“If a Hindu nation is to be created, it is only possible under the BJP,” Tomar said.
More moderate voices say some of the hatred is driven by jealousy at the perceived business acumen of Muslim traders, with extremists seeking a scapegoat for failing finances.
Indresh Maikhuri, a Hindu and civil society activist based in Dehradun, said political leaders saw benefit in boosting their popularity by sowing division.
“Some people want to create a rift between Hindus and Muslims,” he said, warning the “humiliating and segregated treatment” would have “dire consequences.”
As for Salim, he dreams of home.
“This is my motherland,” he said. “Where will I go, leaving this land where I was born?“
