New Delhi: Love thy neighbour. The age-old adage may preach neighbourly bonhomie, but it doesn’t seem to work on an international level, more specifically on the Asian level.
At least this is what an international study would want us to believe.
The Pew Global Attitudes Project recently conducted a survey of citizens of Japan, China, Pakistan, and India.
Conclusion: People from these countries don't like each other all that much.
Surprised about the Indo-Pak bit? After all, shouldn’t the bus diplomacy, the cricket diplomacy and all the other parallel diplomatic measures including the much touted "people-to-people contacts" have reflected somewhere?
Well, notwithstanding recent Confidence Building Measures and peace initiatives between India and Pakistan, people from both the countries continue to view each other in an "unfavourable" and "negative" light.
According to the survey, 50 per cent of Indian respondents find Pakistan "unfavourable" while only 33 per cent gave them the "favourable" tag.
Among the Pakistani respondents, 67 per cent regard Indians as unfavourable.
Pew also found that the neighbourly misgivings and the distrust was quite generalised across Asia.
"For their part, Indians have a highly unfavorable view of Pakistan and are only lukewarm on China," the report stated.
"Pakistanis tend to dislike India and hold middling views of other major Asian countries," Pew said.
The report also found that Indians overwhelmingly support improved relations with the United States (70 per cent), and 75 per cent of Indians who know about the proposed nuclear deal between the two countries support it.
A majority of Indians also believe China will overtake the US as the dominant world power, although the Chinese themselves were not really optimistic about it.
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The survey also found that a significant numbers of Indians, Russians, Japanese and even 43 per cent of Americans also believed that China would overtake the US within 50 years to emerge as the world's leading superpower.
India and Pakistan are not the only two south asian neighbours who share an acrimonious relationship.
People from China and Japan also show a fierce dislike for each other.
Only 28 per cent of Chinese said they had a favourable opinion of Japan, in contrast to the 71 per cent who said their view was either very or somewhat unfavourable.
Japanese showed even greater hostility toward China with 77 per cent saying their view was unfavourable and only 21 percent saying it was favourable.
These figures are a dramatic decline since 2002 when 55 percent of Japanese respondents said they viewed China favourably.
Persistent distrust means that the Chinese and Japanese "consider the other competitive, as well as greedy and arrogant," the study found. "Neither sees the other as honest or generous."
Among their other neighbours, both the Chinese and Japanese express general unfavourable views of Pakistan, while Chinese tend to feel negatively toward India.
Also, more than half of American respondents had unfavourable views of Pakistan.
The six-nation survey - conducted in India, Pakistan, China, Japan, the US and Russia - found that China's growing military strength was seen as threatening by neighbours India, Russia and Japan.
Even its burgeoning economy was considered a bad thing by half of Indians.
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