'From the people of India, to the people of Pakistan'

It took last Saturday's horrendous earthquake for this message of peace and solidarity - that adorns a vast tonnage of aid - to be sent from India to its bitter enemy, Pakistan. Upwards of 20,000 people are thought to have perished in this tragic and catastrophic natural disaster. The scale of the earthquake, the epicentre of which hit the disputed region of Kashmir has united India and Pakistan in the desperate race to help the victims.

This is in stark contrast to the race that under normal circumstances preoccupies the two countries - the nuclear arms race. India and Pakistan have fought three wars over Kashmir since the subcontinent became divided between the Muslim north and predominantly Hindu south in 1947, upon independence from the British Empire. The 1990s saw an escalation as both sides developed nuclear weapons. Indeed in 2002 South Asia narrowly escaped a full-scale nuclear war when tensions rose as India retaliated against attacks by Islamic extremists in Kashmir that the Indian government alleged were supported by the Pakistani military.

More recently there has been a thaw in relations between the two countries as transport links have been reopened and Pakistan’s ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf, met with India’s former leader, Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 2004.

Interestingly, precedent for the influence large-scale natural disasters can have on conflict resolution, can be found in the Asian Tsunami that devastated the area earlier this year. In Indonesia, a long running civil war in the wave battered province of Aceh was resolved, and, on the island Sri Lanka, the Colombo government and the separatist Tamil Tigers cooperated to a degree to bring relief to the victims. The Tsunami exposed the pettiness of the conflicts when compared to such a calamitous event. No doubt there will be difficult times ahead in the peace processes of both countries but they are proof of how hope for the future can be derived from even the most terrible of disasters.

It is estimated that 65,000 people have died in the low-level conflict in Kashmir in the last fifteen years. Perhaps the 20,000 killed on Saturday by an ’act of God’ will finally be enough death to motivate the governments in New Delhi and Islamabad to end, once and for all, their futile and potentially deadly feud.