“Good Fences Make Good Neighbors”: Lessons from Frost for Pakistan’s India Policy

In Frost’s 'Mending Wall', I see our subcontinental dilemma: the yearning for connection and the necessity of separation. Some wounds, surely, do not heal by wishful thinking but by wise distance.

Robert Frost, in his enduring poem Mending Wall, tells the story of two neighbours who walk along the boundary between their lands each spring, repairing the damage inflicted by winter and hunters. One neighbour, perhaps a stand-in for the poet himself, questions the ritual, playfully asking, “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know, What I was walling in or walling out.” The other, more stoic and tradition-bound, simply insists: “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Pakistan, in its seventy-seven-year history with India, has perhaps played both roles in Frost’s tale. At times it has questioned the need for walls, extending hands of friendship and cultural exchange. At other times, it has built barricades, literal and metaphorical, in defence of sovereignty and dignity. Today, however, we must confront the pressing truth: the neighbour to the east neither trusts our good intentions nor misses an opportunity to accuse and isolate. In such a hostile climate, Frost’s old wisdom echoes louder than ever: good fences make good neighbors. But unlike Frost’s passive wall, our wall must be built with clarity, consistency, and strength—not of stone alone, but of strategy, security, and self-respect.

A strong wall is not merely barbed wire on the Line of Control (LoC) or diplomatic pushback at the United Nations. It is a metaphor for national coherence: a state that governs firmly, controls all actors within its territory, and speaks with one voice on matters of peace and war.

This realisation for the need for a wall is not born of cynicism but of a sobering maturity. Once, I too romanticised the idea of open borders, of goodwill conquering historical pain, of trust without suspicion. Like many South Asians, I nursed the dream of cultural harmony across the divide between Pakistan and India. After all, how could two nations sharing centuries of intertwined history, language, food, and music not find a path to friendship for mutual good?

But dreams, when unguarded, can become vulnerabilities. And nations, unlike individuals, carry not only memory but mandate, a responsibility to protect their people from both known and unknown harms. In the poetic tensions of Frost’s wall, I now see our subcontinental dilemma: the yearning for connection and the necessity of separation.

In 1947, we inherited a wall. A wall not of stone, but of stories soaked in blood and displacement. It was a wall not merely between geographies, but between imaginations. In the years that followed, Pakistan and India crafted national identities that often defined themselves in opposition to the other. The border became not just a political demarcation but a psychic line, reinforced by wars, mistrust, and propaganda.

Frost’s speaker muses that walls are unnatural, that nature itself “sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun.” In South Asia too, every now and then, there have been attempts to mend a relationship fractured at birth.

But nature also teaches us something else: not all things are meant to blend. There are species that must stay apart to survive. Boundaries are not always expressions of hatred; sometimes, they are expressions of respect. Respect for difference, for distance, for the complex histories that cannot be undone by mere sentiment.

It is tempting to believe that trust can forge lasting peace. That if we open our arms, the other will not strike. That goodwill is contagious. But such optimism, while noble, must be tempered by realism. As the philosopher Thomas Hobbes observed, in the absence of enforceable trust, the natural state of man, and by extension, of nations, is one of mutual suspicion.

Pakistan has experienced firsthand how gestures of friendship have often been met with duplicity. From diplomatic overtures ignored or derailed, to cross-border violations cloaked in plausible deniability, we have learned the hard way that trust without caution is a luxury we can ill afford.

To advocate for strong borders is not to advocate for hate. The wall, in Frost’s poem, is not built out of enmity but necessity. The neighbour does not hurl stones; he simply understands that “good fences make good neighbours.” There is a profound lesson in that restraint.

For Pakistan and India, this means accepting the wall as a fact of life, not as a symbol of failed dreams, but as a safeguard for peace. Those having unguarded idealism must give way to structured pragmatism.

A strong wall does not preclude dialogue; in fact, it enables honest dialogue. When each side feels secure in its sovereignty, it can engage without fear of infiltration, military or ideological. When the rules of engagement are clear, the conversation is cleaner. Without that clarity, every handshake is shadowed by suspicion.

Choosing the wall, however, means mourning the fantasy of seamless bonding. It means giving up on the urge of spontaneous reunions. It means acknowledging that some wounds do not heal by wishful thinking but by wise distance.

There is pain in this realism. There are mothers in divided families, lovers whose lives parted with the Radcliffe Line, poets whose verses now need visas. The emotional toll of the wall is real and raw. But there is a greater pain in naivety, a pain that repeats itself each time trust is broken, each time hope is weaponised.

We do not have to hate across the wall. We can, instead, learn to respect the silence it offers, the stability it grants. Like Frost’s speaker walking with his neighbour to mend the wall each spring, we too can maintain this boundary, not out of coldness but mutual security.

Ironically, the wall may be the very thing that allows genuine connection in the long run. When neighbours are secure, they can be civil. When sovereignty is unquestioned, cooperation becomes possible. Without a wall, we risk entanglement. With a wall, we can aspire to equilibrium.

Robert Frost leaves the tension unresolved. He does not dismantle the wall, but neither does he celebrate it blindly. That is the wisdom we must emulate. In the fraught dance of geopolitics, good walls do make good neighbours. Not because they shut the world out, but because they let trust grow at its own pace—slow, deliberate, and rooted in reality. Let Pakistan and India, like Frost’s neighbours, continue to walk their sides of the wall with dignity.

For the uninitiated, this is the poem, which is among my favourites, I am referring to here:

Mending Wall

By Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,

But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’