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To Amritsar and back
Murtaza Razvi
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
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 ither 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
cricketerturned 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-topeople 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?
27 September, 2006
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