Author: Resident and Ambassador Fellow, Bharat Sharma
Over the 2025 summer, I led a six-week India–Pakistan youth dialogue that brought together fourteen young participants from Delhi and Lahore for structured, weekly conversations. A number of projects that focus on people-to-people ties between India and Pakistan do exist, but the novelty my project brought was, rather than entering the dialogue on formal politics or conflict narratives, designing the program around everyday themes—identity, memory, language, family life, and personal aspirations.
This was meant to create space for participants to encounter one another as people, rather than as “Indian” or “Pakistani”. The project involved both careful planning and improvisation. I worked on the ground in New Delhi with local partners while collaborating closely with a Pakistani colleague coordinating parallel engagement in Lahore. Together, we developed discussion prompts, facilitation norms, and reflection exercises that prioritized listening, curiosity, and psychological safety—especially important given the political sensitivities surrounding cross-border engagement after a tense period of heightened India–Pakistan tensions, when public appetite for people-to-people initiatives was limited.
Looking back, I think of the project positively: nationalities were, yes, the elephant in the room, but participants began to recognize shared anxieties, humor, and moral dilemmas that cut across national boundaries. The experience reshaped how I think about peace-building, which is a slow, relational process built through very banal, ordinary conversations. It reinforced my belief that dialogue, when carefully structured, can create forms of understanding that formal diplomacy may not.
Dialogue, when carefully structured, can create forms of understanding that formal diplomacy may not.
Bharat Sharma
About the Author
Bharat Sharma is an I-House DC Resident and Robert Abernethy Scholar (2024-present). He is a second-year Master’s student at Johns Hopkins SAIS in Washington, DC. As an Ambassador Fellow at the House, Bharat continues to lead cross-national peacebuilding conversations and promote Resident-led event planning that showcases diverse cultures and brings different perspectives to the wider community. On September 21, 2025 (International Peace Day), he moderated a discussion with Dr. Dipali Mukhopadhyay, Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS and a leading scholar of conflict and governance in Afghanistan and Syria. The discussion primarily explored two questions:
1. What are the main challenges of peace-building in conflict-prone regions?
2. What does it mean to “do IR” in today’s world?
