For 2004, the Magsaysay award was presented to Mr. Laxminarayan Ramdas, chairperson of the Pakistan-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy, and Ibn Abdur Rehman, director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan for "their reaching across a hostile border to nurture a citizen-based consensus for peace between Pakistan and India.

The Award was named after the late Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay and is known as the Asian equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
Both awardees described the history of conflict between India and Pakistan and spoke about experiments at dialogue which included successful conventions in the two countries attended by people of both nationalities.

Speaking at a forum organized by the Asian Institute of Management to facilitate the two awardees, Mr. Rehman said, "The forum was born out of an initiative for people-to-people dialogue. We have had six conventions: three in India, three in Pakistan. We persuaded parliamentarians and businessmen from India to visit Pakistan, and vice versa... They discovered a different Pakistan than what they had read in textbooks."

"Amid wars, we persuaded in communicating," added Mr. Ramdas. "This provided encouragement to people that this must be sustained... We must learn managing for change. The best area of our concentration has been addressing the new generation so they can accept change as it arises." "It is ultimately the people's will that must be represented. No bilateral agreement between two leaders can succeed unless it genuinely reflects the will of the people... Let humanity come first and nationality be pushed to the background."

These efforts have occurred in the backdrop of development of nuclear weapons and possibilities of a nuclear catastrophe during periods of increased deployment of armed forces. While, the problem seems intractable both Ibn Abdur Rehman of Pakistan and Laxminarayan Ramdas of India believe there is hope. As leaders of the Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy, they are building popular support for peace on both sides of the border.

Abdur Rehman, a Punjabi Muslim born in 1930, was away at Aligarh University in 1947 when Partition violence erupted in his hometown and several members of his family were killed by rampaging communalists. Rehman was obliged to migrate to Pakistan with his father. In Lahore, he found his vocation in journalism, rising from post to post at leading Pakistani publications to become chief editor of the Pakistan Times in 1989. By 1993, Rehman had left the Times, under pressure for criticizing the government.

Laxminarayan Ramdas, a Hindu from Mumbai, was fourteen at the time and living in Delhi. He describes his family as one that respected plurality of religious faiths. Ramdas became a cadet at India’s Armed Forces Academy in Dehradun and, later, the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, England. He rose from command to command until, in 1990, he was named chief of India’s navy. Ramdas had since retired and now has a Pakistani son-in-law.

As tensions again rose between India and Pakistan, both men sought to influence their countries to change course. In September 1994, Rehman joined twenty-four like-minded Indians and Pakistanis in Lahore to open a public dialogue for reconciliation and peace. This led to the formation of the Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy. Rehman became founding chair of the Pakistan branch; Ramdas was named vice-chair of the India branch and became chair in 1996. Both men guided the organization until 2003.

The main strategy for increased peace in the South Asia, this group decided, was dialogue. In a series of conventions beginning in 1995, it drew hundreds of Indians and Pakistanis together to promote demilitarization, denuclearization, and peace and to publish resolutions insisting upon mutual arms reductions and troop pullbacks; an end to cross-border provocations; and a "peaceful, democratic solution" in Kashmir. Meeting alternately in Pakistan and India, the conventions sustained this dialogue for ten years.

Over time, the Forum’s base has grown to embrace a web of environmental, human rights, trade union, and women’s rights activists as well as concerned citizens from the academia, industry, and the professions. During these years, the Forum organized people-to-people delegations of lawmakers, diplomats, soldiers, artists, and students to open friendly talk channels between Indians and Pakistanis and to counteract propaganda in each country demonizing the other. It campaigned for the liberalization of travel between the two countries and for the revision of hate-filled school textbooks.

At another level, Forum leaders such as Rehman and Ramdas worked behind the scenes with national leaders and opinion makers to promote the peace agenda. The Forum’s mission is quite simple and grounded in reality. "It is enough," Rehman says, "to contribute in easing the tension between the two countries by providing opportunities for people to meet."