India-Pakistan peace: An impossible dream?

A personal story from the founder of an organisation aimed at uplifting communities, who celebrated his 70th birthday in Bradford, U.K. with the screening of a film based on a play about Gandhi and Jinnah — essential viewing for schools and communities

Is peace between India and Pakistan an impossible ambition?

Decades of conflict, political mistrust, religious nationalism, and competing interpretations of history have created divisions that seem too deep to overcome.

Yet my life has taught me that relations between ordinary people can be very different from relations between states.

When I arrived in Britain as a 12-year-old boy in 1969 to join my father in Bradford, I could barely speak English. I had to learn a new language, adapt to a different culture, and find my place in an unfamiliar country. Until then, I had lived in the village of Musa in the Harzo Chaach region of Punjab, Pakistan. I remember the multifaith character of the area, hailed for its mandirs and gurdwaras.

Our family was poor and like many immigrant parents of his generation, my father understood that education offered a route to a better life. He endured considerable hardship and made enormous sacrifices to create opportunities for his children. I studied, took various jobs, and eventually trained as a research scientist.

But some of my most important lessons came from the people around me. Growing up in Bradford, I had friends who were Hindu, Sikh, and Christian. We did not define one another by religion. We were simply friends, connected by our shared heritage — food, humour, family values and culture — and by the common experience of improving our lives in Britain. My closest friend from school, a Sikh, remains my best friend more than 50 years later.

Bradford is a former industrial city in northern England shaped by successive generations of migration. Its Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Christian, Jewish and other communities make it one of Britain’s most multicultural cities. Its experience has not always been easy, but it demonstrates that people with roots across Southasia can live, work and build relationships together.

A quest to improve lives

Remove political manipulation and most ordinary people get along remarkably well. This lesson has guided my life’s work. In 1990, I founded the Quest for Economic Development Foundation, known as Q.E.D., to advance the social, educational and economic position of Britain’s ethnic minority communities. Over the past 36 years, Q.E.D. has directly supported more than 40,000 people from 26 nationalities and helped thousands of leaders and organisations engage more effectively with diverse communities as employees and customers.

Behind those figures lies a larger quest: To help reduce poverty and inequality, often among the root causes of conflict and intolerance. We also aim to contribute towards a world where people can live in peace, share in prosperity and enjoy harmonious relations.

My understanding of Islam has been central to that quest. Our behaviour towards one another is shaped by relationships — as parents and children, siblings, friends, colleagues, and neighbours. Beneath these connections lies the most fundamental relationship of all: Our relationship with one another as human beings.

Whatever our religion, nationality or ethnicity, we are remarkably similar. We love our families; worry about our children, health and old age; seek dignity and security; experience happiness and grief; and hope for a better future.

Our differences often arise from where and how we were brought up,as Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Jews, people of no faith or members of other traditions. We should not erase those differences but understand, respect, and celebrate them. They enrich our societies. Every community should be able to value its faith and heritage while respecting the dignity of others.

Gandhi and Jinnah

This was brought home to me on my 70th birthday, 15 August 2026, when Q.E.D. and Bradford’s National Science and Media Museum screened the film version of a remarkable play titled Gandhi and Jinnah Return Home.

Written by the distinguished scholar, former diplomat and interfaith advocate Dr. Akbar Ahmed and directed by the arts activist Manjula Kumar, the play was first performed in Washington D.C. It imagines Gandhi and Jinnah returning to the contemporary world. They confront religious intolerance, violence, the treatment of minorities and divisions within the countries whose futures they helped shape.

Its central question is challenging: Where are the modern-day Gandhis and Jinnahs — the leaders prepared to confront hatred, resist division and defend coexistence?

If we wait for exceptional political leaders to emerge, we may be waiting forever. Peacebuilding can begin in classrooms, universities, community centres, places of worship, and conversations between ordinary people.

It is good to know that the film has been screened at literary festivals in Karachi and Houston. There is a dire need for it to be screened and discussed in schools and universities across Southasia and among diaspora communities. Used thoughtfully, it could become a grassroots educational intervention against political polarisation.

Too often, the teaching of Partition sanitises its human cost, presents history through a narrowly national lens or bypasses its most painful questions. Young people may learn dates and the names of political leaders without fully encountering the experiences of families who lost their loved ones, their homes, crossed new borders, witnessed violence or became minorities overnight.

In some settings, history is not merely neglected but weaponised. Selective accounts encourage new generations to inherit grievances they did not experience and to regard neighbouring communities with suspicion.

Education should do the opposite. It should enable students to examine different perspectives, distinguish historical evidence from political mythology, and recognise the human consequences of intolerance. Drama and film are powerful because they allow audiences to encounter history emotionally as well as intellectually.

Change is possible

One of those present at the Bradford screening of Gandhi and Jinnah was Adeeba Malik, who joined QED in 1992 as a young woman. Born and brought up in Bradford to Pakistani parents, she has been my colleague and mentee for almost 35 years.

In 2015, she was awarded a CBE – Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, one of the highest-ranking civilian honours in the U.K. Ten years later, in December 2025, she was appointed His Majesty’s Lord-Lieutenant of West Yorkshire, making her the King’s personal representative in the county — the first woman of Asian heritage to attain this office in the U.K.

For me, Adeeba’s accomplishments represent the culmination of Q.E.D.’s 35-year campaign to ensure that people from ethnic minority communities can participate and lead at every level of British life. It also reflects a changing Britain in which a woman of Pakistani Muslim heritage can occupy one of the country’s most historic civic offices while representing everyone, irrespective of religion, ethnicity or background.

It shows that integration does not require people to abandon their identities. It means bringing the richness of those identities into a shared national life.

Our common humanity is not a sentimental ideal. It is the only secure foundation upon which lasting peace can be built.

These are values upheld by the voluntary organisation Southasia Peace Action Network, about which I learnt from Dr. Ahmed. I fully support this movement across borders because it reflects what my experience has taught me: Dialogue and relationships matter, and peace is built through many small acts of courage and cooperation.

The task of peacebuilding may seem as daunting as being asked to eat an elephant.  But, as a saying attributed to Archbishop Desmond Tutu reminds us, there is only one way to eat an elephant — one bite at a time.

We must approach peace in the same way: One school screening, one honest history lesson, one interfaith friendship, one community conversation, and one courageous act at a time.

We cannot change the past, but we can decide what we pass on to the next generation: inherited suspicion and hostility, or the determination to build something better.

As Gandhi and Jinnah Return Home reminds us, we do not have to agree about everything in order to listen. Nor do we need identical interpretations of history to recognise our shared responsibility for the future.

Our common humanity is not a sentimental ideal. It is the only secure foundation upon which lasting peace can be built.

Mohammed Ali, OBE, is the founder and chief executive, Q.E.D. Foundation. His awards include an honorary doctorate from the University of Bradford in 1997, and the OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 2001. This piece is updated from the original published in View&News. Email: m.ali@qed-uk.org.

This is a Global Southasia (formerly Sapan News) syndicated feature available for republication with due credit to sapannews.com.

Why ‘Southasia’ as one word? Because our histories entangle, our struggles intersect, and our futures are bound together.

This article was written and edited by humans. Click here for the Global Southasia AI policy.

Appreciated the story? Support non-profit journalism. Make a tax-deductible contribution to Global Southasia.

Thank You