By Murtaza Razvi

Date:18-09-06

Source: Dawn

IT was on Independence Day this year when a group of Pakistani lawmakers, businesspeople, media persons and NGO workers were invited to Amritsar by the South Asia Free Media Association’s India chapter. Safma Pakistan had made arrangements to cross over the Wagah border into Attari — Amritsar is located only 32 miles east of downtown Lahore.

The aim was to celebrate Pakistan’s and India’s independence days by marching from the Minar-i-Pakistan, Lahore, to the Jallianwala Bagh, the scene of the 1919 massacre by Gen Reginald Dyer, in Amritsar. The tragedy had left hundreds of anti-colonial protesters dead. They had gathered there to protest against the imposition of the notorious Rowlett Act that severely curtailed civil liberties. The massacre became a watershed in the Indian resistance movement against the colonial rule.

On this year’s Independence Day, there were no colonial masters on either side of the border, but the uncanny trappings of that era were still present. The uniformed guards on both sides of the border, the stern looks on their faces, the suspicious officials wishing to see, check and note down your passport details even though you had been cleared by immigration for the short walkover, and finally the long gaze that followed you until you were out of their respective territories.

‘Damn! I wish I could have stopped him’ was the overall impression you got from their body language. The day was hot and muggy, but the atmosphere across the border, past officialdom, was warm, and the grass certainly greener, given East Punjab’s green revolution since independence.

There was immense pride among our local hosts, a surprising feeling of triumph for some odd reason which did not become apparent to us until later in the course of our stay.

Amritsar is full of people who had immigrated to the city from West Punjab at independence, and who had not had the opportunity to go back ever since. Many just longed to visit the Sikh holy places in and beyond Lahore, but most had given up that hope years ago.

They felt elated at seeing us; for them it was that one rare occasion when people from West Punjab had come to visit them, and not simply to go on to Delhi — incommunicado. Somehow, the Lahore-Amritsar bus has not taken off the way the Lahore-Delhi bus has. While it is no more impossible to acquire an Indian visa for an average Pakistani to travel to Delhi and beyond, East Punjab remains a largely ‘out of bounds’ destination.

The problem on the other side with Sikh pilgrims seeking a visa to travel to Pakistan is a compounded one. They must travel up to nearly 500km further east to Delhi to apply for a visa and, if granted, they must board the bus from Delhi to Lahore. The waiting period on the sector is two weeks. Neither the Indian nor the Pakistani high commissions encourage direct travel between Amritsar and Lahore. The reason? Perhaps a missing bureaucratic link that has failed to sanctify the more convenient and much shorter journey or simply a walk across the border between the two countries.

It was this irritant that consumed much of the energy of the Indian speakers who participated in a daylong seminar on the India-Pakistan peace process on August 15 in Amritsar. Fire-brand Bharatiya Janata Party cricketer-turned politician and an Amritsar MP in the Lok Sabha Sardar Navjot Singh said he could not believe in the ongoing peace process as long as ordinary people were restricted from travelling between East and West Punjab. He got a standing ovation. The sentiment was echoed by most other speakers and understandably so. Sikhs have most of their holiest places of worship in West Punjab and the Frontier, including the birthplace of Baba Guru Nanak, the founder of the creed, in Nankana Sahib near Lahore.

A large number of journalists, intellectuals and politicians, led by the veteran columnist Kuldip Nayar had come all the way from Delhi to participate in the peace march activities. At midnight between August 14 and 15, we were driven back to the border to light lamps to symbolise the burying of the hatchet that had led to wholesale killings during the partition riots. There, close by, we were also treated to a peace concert arranged under a receding half-moon in the wide open countryside. It seemed like the whole of Amritsar had turned up that night to catch a glimpse of the visiting Pakistanis, who were asked to come on to the stage one after the other to say a few words or just to wave at a crowd comprising no less than several thousand people.

Amritsar is a city of some half a million which makes it rather small by Indian standards. Though a border outpost, it is surprisingly well equipped in terms of amenities, hotels, restaurants, luxury shopping and, well, you name it. Also, it is a very affluent city, that is, again by subcontinent’s standards. There were far fewer beggars in the street, and even those that were there looked reasonably well fed and better clothed than in many bigger Indian cities. Women looked as modern, well dressed and confident riding their motorcycles or scooters or simply going about their business as they do in Delhi or Mumbai — a sharp contrast with many Pakistani cities, big or small.

The city has a variety of restaurants that stay open quite late at night. The fare varies from regular north Indian food to south Indian, fast food and Chinese. The city has a lovely, huge garden, the colonial time Company Bagh, bang in the middle of its fashionable shopping district, the Civil Lines. It has a good number of cinema houses showing the latest Indian and English flicks, a museum and a reasonably well maintained art gallery and an art school. The gates of the art gallery were flung open on a public holiday for some of us Pakistanis who had just ventured there while walking around in the city.

The average man in the street is generally friendly but restricts himself to speaking Punjabi, as opposed to Hindi. However, once you tell them you are visiting from Pakistan, they suddenly switch to Urdu and show courtesy: one in every 10 people you come across invariably tells you they too are from Pakistan, implying that they or their parents had migrated to East Punjab at independence from our side of the border.

Lahore is a universal obsession, with nearly everyone wishing to visit the city once in a lifetime. Indeed, many tell you they ‘are’ from Lahore, of which only memories remain — those shared by their parents or grandparents. A frequently asked spontaneous question was: “how are our Punjabi brethren across the border?” This was invariably followed by an awkward self-response: “Punjabis everywhere are the same”.

In the seminar that took place on India-Pakistan rapprochement on August 15, and in subsequent discussions with individual participants and members of the general audience a constant refrain was ‘why can’t we use Lahore airport to fly in and out of India instead of having to go all the way to Delhi?’ Farmers asked why could they not export their basmati through the Lahore dry port. Industrialists, too, shared similar import-export-related concerns from and to the world beyond South Asia.

Questions abounded but answers went little further than beyond blaming New Delhi and Islamabad, the former more often than the latter, for the slow pace of the peace process. You got the feeling that the memory of Sikhs’ killings outside East Punjab in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s murder lingered more poignantly than the late prime minister’s military action on the Golden Temple. An undercurrent of anger, combined with Punjabi ego and pride over manual hard work Sikhs are known for, was the overall impression you gathered and brought home with you of the people living across the border.

The immense, general goodwill that exists towards Pakistan should be garnered by opening consulates of the two countries in Lahore and Amritsar and by encouraging people-to-people contacts between East and West Punjab. This could serve as a short cut to building more confidence between the two countries and over time creating a people-to-people based vested interest in the continuation of the peace process.

But the question remains: Are New Delhi and Islamabad ready to listen to the heartbeats of their own people?