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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Journeys |
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Journeys |
Uneasy Neighbours and a Near-empty Coach
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| On the Friendship Bus between Amritsar and Lahore, there is still plenty of room to stretch out |
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MUNISH SHARMA/REUTERS |
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| Lowering respective flags during the daily ‘Beating the Retreat’ ceremony at Wagah.
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| I |
FIRST LAID EYES ON PAKISTAN in 2005. I had come to Amritsar to see the Golden Temple and, on a whim, decided to hop in a cramped share jeep and head to the village of Attari, the westernmost settlement along India’s share of the 2,500-kilometre Grand Trunk (GT) Road. By the time I arrived, the sun was dropping quickly towards the horizon and the |
only motorable crossing point along the Indo-Pak border was about to shut for the day. The jeep dropped us off about 100 metres from the border and we walked briskly along the barbed wire-lined road towards Pakistan. None of us were planning to cross to the other side, though; we’d come for the lowering of the flags, the famous border closing ceremony that had become a cash cow for Amritsar’s taxi drivers.
Our little group was halted along with hundreds of other spectators at a large gate. Khaki-clad officials made a symbolic attempt at crowd control, barely able to corral the hyped-up masses into an amphitheatre-like arrangement of seats. I found a spot to stand, along the side of the seating area from where I caught occasional glimpses of the proceedings when my view was not obscured by the heads of three towering Scandinavians. I spent the next 45 minutes listening to aggressive shouts and grunts being exchanged by border guards, occasionally getting up on my tiptoes for views of the soldiers’ high kicking legs and the bobbing plumage of their headdresses. Finally, two sets of massive steel gates running along the Radcliffe Line were slammed shut, creating a seal between the Indian and Pakistani halves of a divided Punjab, one often referred to as the Berlin Wall of South Asia.
| N |
EARLY FIVE YEARS HAD PASSED before my next visit to Attari. India and Pakistan were now sexagenarians and India had put a hold on peace talks with their western neighbour since the terrorist attacks on Mumbai. Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram has made one subsequent visit to Pakistan this June, the first by an Indian official since |
26/11, and one of the issues brought up besides shared 26/11 intelligence was easier access to visas for Indians and Pakistanis. Being granted a visa still involves many hurdles on both sides of the border—for me, an American, the hassle was mostly bureaucratic—and for now, the easiest option for Punjabis to cross their partitioned land is still the ‘Friendship Bus.’
On this trip, I wanted to cross the border and visit Lahore, but didn’t want to brave the 11-hour journey on the Delhi- Lahore bus that would deposit me in Pakistan’s cultural capital well after dark. Instead, I opted to break up my trip, taking an express train to Amritsar and heading to Lahore the next day on the air-conditioned and video-equipped Punj-Aab Express, a super-deluxe coach that came with its very own flashing siren and onboard police escorts.
| MOHSIN RAZA/REUTERS |
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A bus carrying officials arrives in Pakistan from India on 11 December 2005, as part of the Friendship Bus launch. |
The Amritsar-Lahore bus and a second service connecting Amritsar to Nankana Sahib, the birthplace of Sikhism’s first guru, Guru Nanak Dev, were launched in 2006. Both services started operations with hopes from both sides that another line of transport between Pakistan and India would help improve trade relations and give Indian Sikhs easier access to major pilgrimage sites on the Pakistan side of Punjab. Two buses were assigned to the journey—Pakistan’s aptly named Dosti (friendship) Bus and India’s Punj- Aab Express. However, within a couple of years, rumours began to circulate that the service’s future looked grim: the buses were running with as few as two or three passengers and it simply didn’t make financial sense to continue. After the launch, both sides were considering opening visa facilities near Wagah, making it easier for people from each side of the border to gain access to the other, but this never happened. Indians wishing to obtain a visa to Pakistan have to travel all the way to Delhi and pay a visit to the Pakistan Embassy there. For many people, it’s simply not worth the time and expense.
I arrived at Amritsar’s international bus stand expecting no more than a handful of co-passengers and wondering whether I just might get the entire bus to myself. I wasn’t far off. I counted a total of ten other passengers on the 43- seater bus. The Punj-Aab Express would make the 66-kilometre journey to Lahore at a mere quarter of its capacity; and this was a good day for business. After clearing security, where my bags were hand-checked by a policewoman, their safeness confirmed with an obligatory paper luggage tag, I was allowed to board. Within minutes after I settled into my window seat, the doors were shut and the ignition turned on. As we pulled onto GT Road, the driver blazed the sirens and sped toward the border. We passed crowds of people who had gathered along the roadside to watch the bus, which, despite having been operational for over four years, still retained its novelty. I leaned against the window and drifted off to sleep, waking only when the bus came to an abrupt halt just outside the Indian immigration office at the Wagah border crossing.
Sleepy-eyed, I took my luggage and followed my fellow passengers into a bleak, single-storey building, joining them in a huddle at the immigration counter. We were given departure forms and asked to surrender our passports in one big group and wait until further notice. I took advantage of the break in our journey to step outside and see if the border was how I remembered it. But the crowds of tourists I had been among on my first trip had been replaced with blue-coated porters and colourful Tata lorries filled to the brim with fluffy clouds of raw cotton. In 2007, trucks from each side were allowed to cross into their neighbour’s territory for the first time, albeit amidst outcries from angry coolies whose livelihoods depended on carrying goods across the border. Most of the coolies here were leisurely smoking bidis under the shade of a huge banyan tree, and the trucks didn’t seem to be going anywhere, either.
| AP PHOTO |
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Big hugs and headwear from both sides of a divided Punjab. |
After a good half hour, we were officially stamped out of India and herded back onto the bus. A young man seated across from me introduced himself as Atul and then launched into a barrage of questions about my age, provenance, marital status, job title and monthly earnings that continued until the bus reached Pakistan’s immigration hall, some 100 metres away. The place looks like an international airport, with high ceilings, sleek, modern fixtures and floors shiny enough to be used as mirrors—a stark contrast to India’s Soviet-style building. I ended up being the first of my party to enter and was quickly moved through customs without any search or complication. The only question the customs official asked of me was whether I had anything to declare. “Such as liquor?” he suggested, his intonation rising at the end of his phrase, making him sound almost hopeful that I might bring booze into a country where it was forbidden. Fortunately, I had brought nothing more than a few changes of clothes and toiletries.
After clearing customs, we made our way back to where the bus was supposed to be parked, although the Punj-Aab Express was nowhere to be found. Instead, there was a much older, dingier bus waiting for us, painted in Pakistan’s national colours, green and white. One of our fellow passengers summoned us aboard with a “we change here” and a wave of his hand, and we were back on the road, finally on our way to Lahore. Or so I thought.
We drove another 20 metres or so to a Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation building for a break. Atul, the only other lone traveller on the bus, had defaulted to being my travel buddy for the rest of the journey west, and he asked me to join him for a cup of tea. Now it was my turn to ask the questions. Although I wasn’t particularly interested in Atul’s personal life or annual earnings, I did want to know why he was going to Lahore. Did he have family ties there? Not really. Had he been before? Never. Atul was a businessman, dealing in cement. Apparently, Pakistan has a surplus of cement, as well as some of the world’s cheapest limestone, making it a great place to pick up a few tonnes of the most useful materials on the planet. Moreover, the border at Wagah had recently been opened specifically for cement trading. Atul would spend three days in Lahore, schmoozing with local cement barons and hopefully striking a deal. He was enthusiastic about the kind of money that could be made through Indo-Pak trade.
My reasons for visiting Lahore were clearly not as interesting. Atul scoffed when I told him I had made the trip because I wanted to visit the renowned Lahore Museum.
“A museum?” he asked in a voice ridden with sarcasm. “That’s fun for you?”
“Well, yeah,” I replied. “I’m interested in the history of Lahore, so I thought I would come check it out. It’s the cultural capital of Pakistan, you know.” He rolled his eyes like a cooler-than-thou adolescent, clearly uninterested.
Atul had grown up in Jalandhar, Punjab, the only son of the first generation in his family to have been born in independent India. His father, the son of an army officer, had been born in a village just outside Lahore. When Atul’s father was only two years old, his family took up a posting in Delhi. A year later, British India was divided into the Union of India and the Dominion of Pakistan, with Lahore falling into the jurisdiction of the latter. The family would never be able to return home, even for a visit. Yet unlike most people with familial roots in Lahore, Atul seemed disinterested in learning about the city. “I’m here for business, to make MO- N-E-Y,” he assured me, still bemused, “not to see museums.”
| FAISAL MAHMOOD /REUTERS |
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Home Minister Chidambaram arrives in Islamabad on 25 June to discuss, mostly, the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008, but also visas. |
Once the ten minutes we’d been allotted for tea had expired, we got back on the bus. It was time to leave the no man’s land of the border and drive the remaining 30 kilometres to Lahore. While the Pakistani side of GT Road was not exactly comparable to another country, there certainly were a few striking differences. First, the signs were not in Gurmukhi or Devanagari, the scripts respectively used to write Punjabi and Hindi, but rather in Urdu’s Nasta’liq and the Shahmukhi script used in Pakistan for Punjabi. The auto-rickshaws looked a little different too, more like motorbikes with attached trailers, and the men were wearing white skullcaps rather than colourful turbans. These were all superficial, but there was one striking disparity when we crossed the border: the lush, green fields of India’s Punjab, a boon from the state’s Green Revolution, were no more. With the exception of a few bright yellow mustard fields, most of the farmland along the road was a barren, dusty brown. We continued through the countryside, along the Lahore Canal that stretches from Wagah. As we neared Lahore, we were joined by a police jeep, complete with armed escorts, that led us to the international bus stand, where we were rushed off the coach and into the care of taxi drivers from our respective hotels.
| T |
HE NEXT DAY, while Atul was likely out purchasing literally tonnes of concrete, I decided to explore Lahore. My first stop was the Lahore Museum, one of Pakistan’s foremost collections of art and artefacts. The museum is housed in a domed Mughal building on Mall Road, not far from a slew of white colonial-era buildings eerily reminiscent of Delhi’s Connaught |
Circus. I wandered through the ground floor of the 115-year-old museum, squinting at tiny miniature paintings on ivory canvases and circumambulating Buddha statues and Shiva lingams whose presence quietly illustrated Pakistan’s multi-religious past. I soon found myself amongst ancient relics from Gandhara, including the museum’s best-known sculpture: The Fasting Buddha. After pausing to examine the detailed veins and bones of the emaciated-looking stone figure, I walked past the preserved façade of an ancient Jain temple and into the museum’s weapons room—a Mughal dagger made of rhinoceros hide and studded with the animal’s teeth being the most extraordinary tool of war in the room. Everything from the look of the museum to the treasures it contained reminded me of India and Pakistan’s common history, although one exhibit, displayed prominently in the centre of the weapons room, made me doubt my admittedly simplistic and idealistically naïve view about the brotherhood between the people of the two nations. Ensconced in a glass case were a series of seven large ammunition shells, with the inscription: ‘Shells fired on Dwarka (India) by each ship of the Pakistan Navy in the 1965 Indo-Pak War.’ The very day of my visit, India and Pakistan were set to resume talks after India had put dialogue on hold in light of suspected Pakistani involvement in 26/11. While cross-border buses were running and diplomats were taking stabs at improving relations, memories of the two countries’ tumultuous relations in the 20th century were still fresh. Whether or not Chidambaram’s June visit can set the two countries on a path of 21st century reconciliation is yet to be seen.
| I |
NEXT SAW ATUL AT THE BUS STATION, a half-hour before we were scheduled to depart for Amritsar. I had shown up a bit earlier along with two other passengers—both Indian citizens—and had decided to kill a bit of time chatting with one of the officials, who told me there would be a total of four passengers on that day’s trip and the low turnout was pretty normal. |
I asked him why we needed such a big bus for so few passengers; couldn’t they save money on fuel by running a minibus instead? “It’s a friendship bus,” he replied. “Friendship means no gain, no loss! Plus, it’s part of the agreement.” Then why so few passengers? “Very few visas are being issued,” he said.
The much-heralded bus service, symbolic of friendship between the two sides of a fragmented Punjab, was operating with barely any ‘friends’ riding it. But what about foreign tourists? I hadn’t seen anyone who looked foreign during my visit, although surely some people still wanted to visit Pakistan, despite the media hype about the perils of doing so. “There are a few,” the official said, “but it’s easy for you people to get visas.”
| AP PHOTO |
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There are still some who are opposed to Indo-Pak ‘friendship.’ |
I wouldn’t call the visa process for foreigners easy, per se, but it certainly was possible. When I got my visa in Delhi, I was required to get a letter of recommendation from my embassy, deposit a few thousand rupees into the Pakistani embassy’s bank account, type the details of my journey on a form using a typewriter that was surely older than I, and then sit with a customs officer and explain to him, like I had to explain to Atul, that I just wanted to visit a few museums and cultural sites. At least I didn’t have to go through heavy background checks, obtain a letter of invitation from a Pakistani citizen, register with the police upon arrival or return to the police station to get an exit stamp. Not like Atul. Compared to his ordeal, obtaining a visa was a relative cakewalk.
When Atul showed up at the bus stand, he looked frazzled and was still in his pyjamas. He had slept in and almost missed the bus home. Within a few minutes of his arrival we were onboard, waiting to be zipped back towards Wagah. Atul struck up a conversation with the two other men on the bus with us, skilfully pulling their life stories out of them just as he had done mine a few days earlier. One of them, a Sikh, was in Lahore to visit a few religious sites, his visa process made easier by the fact he had a distant cousin living in Pakistan who could sponsor his application. The other passenger was an Indian Muslim from Hyderabad who crossed the border every year for a religious festival. He had been in Pakistan for nearly a month, but wanted to get back to India in time to be with his family for, ironically, the quintessentially Hindu festival of Holi. The chatter continued all the way to the border, where we sorted out the last formalities of our trip: exchanging currency and filling in forms. Once we were officially in India, we all began to check our mobile phones, desperately vying for a network after being in a country where Indian mobiles don’t work. Atul turned to me and, to my surprise, told me he hoped to come back to Lahore and explore the city in a bit more in depth. “I might even go to a museum,” he quipped, although I sensed he was only half serious. Although Atul was one of the privileged few Indians granted a visa to Pakistan, he had spent most of his trip in business meetings and registering at police stations. Still, this time, he’d managed to work up a bit of interest in the hometown of his ancestors.
Within minutes, we were back on the same bus that had picked us up in Lahore, rambling down Amritsar’s stretch of GT Road towards the bus depot. Crowds gathered again, just as they had on our way out, to stare at the green and white bus bearing Pakistan’s hallmark star and crescent. Most of them would never get to ride this symbolic service which, despite its potential to help increase movement between India and Pakistan, is only available to a select few who are allotted visas. Until this changes, glimpses of nearempty buses are the closest most Punjabis—Indian and Pakistani—will ever come to seeing the other half of their cultural homeland.
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