Pakistan’s hottest rock band Junoon plays in Srinagar, Kashmir on Sunday, in what must rate as the biggest music show in decades in one of the world’s most militarised regions.

Junoon, or madness in Arabic,  will play in a heavily fortified auditorium on the banks of the Dal lake, but its Sufi music and soaring guitar riffs should resonate far beyond, given that this is where Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism, struck roots in the subcontinent.

The idea of a Pakistani band playing in the centre of Kashmir, which has been at the heart of 60 years of unremitting hostility between the neighbours, is itself remarkable, a testament to the change that is quietly taking place.

It would have been unimaginable a few years ago, Ïndia’s NDTV quotes a local college professor as saying.

Both nations have faced challenges in recent days; India, the blasts in Jaipur which at another time would have almost reflexively been blamed on the neighbour, and Pakistan renewed bombings and a civilian coalition government that is dangerously drifting apart barely weeks after it was formed.

The neighbours have been tested in Kashmir itself recently with reports of cross-border incursions and gunbattles but they have kept their counsel, and resumed peace talks this week.

So what’s the subtext to Junoon in Kashmir, if at all ? Yusuf Jameel, who has reported extensively on the region, says the political connotations of their presence in the disputed territory are not lost on anyone, and authorities are trying to ensure there is no trouble.

 The concert has been organised by the South Asia Foundation, a non-government organisation, and is part of celebrations marking the  inauguration of the Kashmir Study Institute at Kashmir University. Indian President  Pratibha Patil is expected to attend the show as also other government leaders which obviously complicates the issue.

“After all, Islamabad has not officially given up its claim on Kashmir, though to many both in the neighbouring country (Pakistan) and here in Jammu and Kashmir, it is only dragging its feet from what it would until a few years ago insist is its jugular vein,” writes Jameel. The hardline elements in Kashmiri separatist groups are not going to be very pleased with the Junoon act, he says.

But the band that sometimes has been likened to U2 has been down this kind of road before. Founder Salman Ahmed, who trained to be a medical doctor, says inspired by the music of Led Zeppelin he traded his stethoscope for an electric guitar because he thought that was a better instrument to heal his deeply wounded society.

Blending traditional Sufi music with western instruments and melodies, the  band has created a new genre of pop music, Sufi rock. And their songs call for harmony and peace instead of nuclear proliferation and corruption, making them a constant thorn on the side of Pakistan’s ruling authorities.

In the early 1990s a law was passed - aimed directly at the band - banning “jeans and jackets” from appearing on television. The group  did a video for a song called Accountability which proved too much for then Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

And they have done their bit on the other side of the border too. They were in India playing the week New Delhi stunned the world conducting nuclear tests in the summer of 1998.

“We want cultural fusion, not nuclear fusion”, young Indians waved a banner in a packed concert. Junoon denounced the arms race, saying India and Pakistan couldn’t afford it and were better-off giving their citizens clean drinking water, jobs and health facilities.

The Indian tests were followed by a similar series by Pakistan that month.
 

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is pushing for visa-free travel with India, and has gone to the extent of saying Islamabad might do it unilaterally  if New Delhi is not prepared to go the distance.

As ideas go, visa-free travel in a globalised world isn’t anything remarkable. In the context of the tortured India-Pakistan relationship this, however, would be nothing short of a political masterstroke.

For people like my parents’ generation, among the millions who crossed the border from Pakistan following the bloody partition of India never to go back, visa-free travel would be akin to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Likewise for the millions of Muslims who moved in the opposite direction, leaving homes and some family members behind in India, before the curtain dropped.

Until the peace process began in 2004, there was barely a trickle of Indians and Pakistanis travelling between the two countries. Just over 8,000 visas were issued to Pakistanis by the Indian High Commission in Islamabad the year before; that number reached a bit more respectable figure of 100,000 by 2007. The numbers are far less for Indians visiting Pakistan.

And it must rate as one of the most oppressive visa regimes between any two countries. For one, there is no concept of a tourist visa for nationals from the two countries. I, as an Indian, cannot go to Pakistan as a tourist; it has to be for a purpose such as birth, death or marriage and you must know somebody there, such as a relative or a friend for the application to be even processed.

And if you are one of the handful who do get a visa after months of waiting, it is usually a city-specific visa; so if you are a Pakistani you could get a visa to visit New Delhi but not Mumbai;  for an Indian, it could be Islamabad, but not Rawalpindi. And you must report to the police upon arrival and at the time of departure.

Even diplomats of the two countries suffer much the same restrictions. A Pakistani embassy official based in New Delhi for example cannot travel to Agra three hours away without permission from Indian authorities; and precisely the same restrictions apply to Indian diplomats based in Pakistan.

So for Sharif to suggest abolition of visas - against such a history of distrust - does take your breath away. Is is really possible ? Bombs this week in the Indian tourist city of Jaipur won’t help and only strengthen the case of those who point to external links to the attacks and urge caution in allowing easy movement between the countries.
 

U.S. ambassador Anne W. Patterson, in a speech reported by the Pakistan press, said last week that the depth of anti-Americanism in Pakistan, especially among the middle-class, had surprised her. Pakistan’s long-term interests were aligned with those of the United States, and those opposing U.S. engagement in the country had a limited understanding of  how the partnership based on economic assistance had changed the lives of Pakistanis, she told a meeting in Karachi. For added measure, she said that the “ïncreasingly prosperous middle class” would be the first to suffer if  hardliners gained ground.

She needn’t have looked further than to events last  week to see why America sits rather uneasily on the Pakistani mind, a heavy hand of friendship that Pakistanis are increasingly chafing against.

The New York Times reported that the Pentagon had cancelled the appointment of Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood as the senior American officer based in Pakistan following weeks of criticism in the Pakistani news media over one of his previous jobs : commander of the U.S.  prison at Guantanamo Bay.

“During General Hood’s command from 2004 to 2006, military authorities force-fed with tubes detainees who were engaging in hunger strikes at the Guantánamo prison, a step they justified as necessary to prevent the prisoners from committing suicide to protest their indefinite confinement,” the newspaper said. “Also during General Hood’s tenure, reports that an American guard may have desecrated a Koran stirred wide protests in the Islamic world.”

The surprise was more that he was named to Pakistan in the first place, where resentment about Guantanamo runs deep. It was seen as all the more insensitive  given that a new government had taken over in Islamabad promising  a different approach to tackling Islamist militancy. For while the Pentagon might have been trying to send a crisis-tested 33-year army veteran to Islamabad at a pivotal time in the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda, it was his Guantanamo command that stuck in the Pakistan mind.

“Guantánamo Bay itself has become a symbol of injustice, torture and abuse of Islam, and sending a commanding officer from there to Islamabad begs the question: What is the message coming out of the Pentagon for Pakistanis by this insensitive act?” Shireen M. Mazari, director general of the Institute of Strategic Studies, wrote in The News back in March when the appointment was announced.

There was even more coming on Capitol Hill where, according to Pakistani news reports, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee told the Foreign Affairs Committee of Congress that while the late Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People Party was doing a good job, coalition partner Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), led by Nawaz Sharif, “needed to be watched.”

Her comments, widely reported in the Pakistan press, prompted admonishment at this kind of micromanagement of the affairs of a sovereign nation and warnings that it was a recipe for disaster.

Indeed the News  argued that the more the United States or members of its political establishment criticised Sharif the greater would be his following in a country rife with anti-American sentiment. Conversely Bhutto’s widower Asif Ali Zardari might cringe at praise from Washington because it would not do him any good at home.  

The best Washington could do, the News said, would be to distance itself from governance of the country. It might even arrest the anti-Americanism that  many Americans find hard to accept.