ABSTRACT
The former Indian Prime Minister, Inder Kumar Gujral, once commented, ‘A solution between Pakistan and India had to be evolved, not presented to the people, as if a magician had pulled a rabbit out of a bag’ (Nayar 16 July 2010). Accepting this evolutionary nature of India-Pakistan security relations, I have examined the security discourses of both states by exploring the complex and dichotomous relationship between elite and popular social practices. It is also important to understand this dichotomous analysis. In both countries, people have minimal contact with each other and this gives a free hand to the ruling elites to promote animosity through their social practices towards each other, in line with their own vested interests. These divergent attitudes are closely tied to the respective identity discourses of the two states. But paradoxically, the cross border transcendence of popular culture has brought the people of both states, who share linguistic commonalities, closer together. This inadvertently encouraged me to adopt the ‘popular culture approach’ and study these two societies at the popular level (Milliken 2001).
