At Washington D.C.’s International Student House, many nationalities including Indian and Pakistani share meals and daily life, learning to live without making history the only thing we know about one another. A visit this summer by a Southasian journalist connected that ordinary proximity to a larger project of peace, justice and regional cooperation.
By Umar Zafar and Bharat Sharma / Global Southasia
At the International Student House in Washington D.C. where we live dinner brings everyone into the same room. Chef Warren and Desirée prepare the meal. Residents from around the world collect their plates and find places at the communal tables. Pakistanis and Indians living at the House often sit together, as the two of us do.
The food is familiar to all of us in slightly different ways. So are many of the words, jokes and arguments. We do not settle history over dinner. We learn to live without making history the only thing we know about one another.
In late August, Pakistani journalist, filmmaker and peace activist Beena Sarwar spoke at the House about the Southasia Peace Action Network, or Sapan, which she helped establish in March 2021.
The setting suited the discussion, titled ‘A Peacemongering Conversation’.
Multimedia journalist Beena Sarwar and host Bharat Sharma holding ‘A Peacemongering Conversation’ at the International Student House in Washington, D.C. in August 2026. Photo by Caleb Helsel.
International Student House aims to foster intercultural dialogue, lasting connections and global citizenship through a shared residential community. Residents, who might otherwise encounter one another only through governments, media narratives or national stereotypes, instead become roommates and neighbours.
That evening, dialogue placed everyday experience within the much larger and more difficult politics of Southasia.
Responsibility of the elephants
India and Pakistan are the elephants of the region. The two states are large enough to shape the entire room. When they collide, smaller neighbours often absorb the consequences. Their rivalry dominates regional politics, obstructs cooperation and reduces the diversity of Southasia to an apparently permanent confrontation between New Delhi and Islamabad.
The two Southasian giants, India and Pakistan, cannot claim leadership while behaving as though only their own security matters. Their policies affect trade, travel and diplomacy across the region. Their hostility also weakens the institutions through which Southasians might address shared problems involving climate, water, migration, public health and economic inequality.
Responsible statehood must therefore mean more than defending national territory. It must include protecting the regional space in which neighbouring societies can communicate and cooperate.
Pakistanis and Indians are skilled at identifying everything that is wrong on the other side. But building peace requires the more difficult habit of looking home before pointing outward, as the speaker noted
A Pakistani concern for human rights in India rings hollow when accompanied by silence about repression in Pakistan. The same is true in reverse. Democracy, minority rights, freedom of expression and human dignity cannot become values that we reserve for judging the neighbour.
People-to-people contact is often treated as pleasant decoration around the supposedly more serious work of diplomacy. In reality, it helps create the social constituency without which diplomatic progress remains fragile.
Beena Sarwar also spoke about how national security has come to dominate political life across the region. Under its broad umbrella, dissent can be treated as disloyalty, social movements contained, journalists silenced and people-to-people contact made suspect.
Militarisation is accepted as serious and responsible by default. Peace activists, meanwhile, repeatedly need to prove their patriotism.
This imbalance narrows what citizens are allowed to imagine. When every political question becomes a security question, dialogue itself begins to look dangerous.
This is why the Sapan Founding Charter matters. It offers a minimum common agenda around which people with different political, national and ideological positions can work together.
The Charter calls for soft borders, visa-free travel or visas on arrival; dignity and human rights for all citizens; and regional cooperation in areas including public health, education, culture, legal reform, the environment, climate change, water and demilitarisation. It asks each state to protect its own citizens while extending solidarity to people elsewhere in the region.
“If France and Germany can be part of the European Union, why can’t we?” asked Pakistan’s former finance minister, the late Dr. Mubashir Hasan, a self confessed hawk-turned-dove, who Beena Sarwar quotes.
The integration of these European neighbours is a great example of how histories of war do not have to impose permanent hostility on future generations.
The comparison should not be used to romanticise Europe – its integration has never erased nationalism, inequality or conflict. The relevance of this example is more modest: Political relationships can change. Hostility may be inherited, but it must still be reproduced by institutions, policies and public narratives. It can therefore also be interrupted.
Making contact ordinary
International Student House offers a small example of why such spaces matter. It creates repeated contact. Residents meet again at breakfast, in corridors, at public programmes and over dinner. No single interaction must carry the impossible burden of resolving decades of conflict. That is the element of life at the House most relevant to Sapan’s work.
Indian and Pakistani residents do not assemble for a staged performance of harmony. We are neighbours. Friendship may follow, but proximity comes first.
People-to-people contact is often treated as pleasant decoration around the supposedly more serious work of diplomacy. In reality, it helps create the social constituency without which diplomatic progress remains fragile.
When citizens know one another only through hostile television coverage, official statements and social media outrage, every crisis begins with a ready supply of suspicion. When people have met, shared space and remained in conversation, dehumanisation becomes more difficult.
The aim is not to romanticise life in the diaspora. Those of us who meet in Washington do so under conditions unavailable to millions of people in the region. That inequality is precisely the problem Sapan asks us to confront.
After the discussion the House returned to its rhythm. Warren and Desirée prepared the next meal. Residents from India, Pakistan and elsewhere took their seats.
Nothing dramatic happened and that ordinariness is the political point.
Sapan’s dream is not merely for Southasians to think warmer thoughts about one another. It is that governments and institutions make ordinary contact possible: that people can travel, collaborate, disagree, organise and return home without being treated as security problems. Under one roof in Washington, we already live a small part of that future.
Bharat Sharma is a graduate student in Washington, D.C., and an India-Pakistan peace activist. Umar Zafar is a fellow at Sentient Futures, and founder of Daadras Foundation.
This article was first published in Scroll and is reproduced here with permission.
Why ‘Southasia’ as one word? Because our histories entangle, our struggles intersect, and our futures are bound together.
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