Singh, Musharraf’s Origins May Be a Spur for Detente
By Patrick McDowell
The Associated Press GAH, Pakistan – Lost among timeless farmlands, the Pakistani village of Gah was a dusty backwater until a few days ago, when the tortuous path to peace with India suddenly took a detour through it.
Carefully turning the tattered pages of the three-room school’s enrollment book, teacher Ghulam Mustafa finds the name Manmohan Singh, born in Gah in 1932, enrolled as a pupil in 1937 – the same Manmohan Singh who was sworn in May 22 as prime minister of India.
With Singh’s accession, India and Pakistan for the first time are both ruled by men born in what is now enemy territory – opposite sides of the line that divided their adopted countries amid massive bloodshed when Britain granted independence in 1947.
Now millions are hoping that Singh and Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf – who was born in the ancient Muslim quarters of New Delhi – can draw on their histories as children of the partition to lift the permanent threat of war that has been worsened in recent years by nuclear weapons.
“The leaders of both countries want the situation to improve,” said Sher Mazan, 55, a senior Pakistani Foreign Office official from Gah who frequently visits his family here and owns some of the village’s best farmland.
“Manmohan Singh belongs to this area, so there will be different considerations about Pakistan,” Mazan said.
“Definitely, it will make a difference that he was born here. In our part of the world, we always take care of the place we were born.”
Gah’s 2,000 villagers are farmers and small tradesmen in turbans and baggy pants. Even though the village has electricity, it’s a long way from Oxford University, where Singh studied economics, or the Finance Ministry where he launched India on the road to free-market reforms in the early 1990s.
Singh, 71, was 14 when he left the region with his family, and he hasn’t been back. Musharraf, the 60-year-old general-turned-president of Pakistan, left New Delhi when he was 4 and didn’t revisit the ancestral home until three years ago.
Ahmed Khan, a 73-year-old barber, is one of the few still alive who went to school with Singh, in an era when Gah’s population was equally divided among Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims.
“I played at his house, on the grounds,” Khan recalls. “He was a really good student, yes, but I remember him being very strong. He used to beat us in fights.”
The house where Singh lived with his family – wealthy Sikh landlords who also ran a dried fruit business – is now only a pile of stones near a well, overlooking terraced wheat fields. The Hindu and Sikh owners of the neighboring homes fled to India decades ago and the Muslims moved in.
Gah is in northern Pakistan’s Punjab province – part of a princely state split by partition, with the rest now in India. The village was a microcosm of partition’s human price. Villagers recall Muslim outsiders massacring two dozen Hindus after hearing that Hindus somewhere were killing Muslims. Refugee Muslims were later settled here with government land grants, but they soon sold out and moved to the city.
Overall, some 10 million to 12 million people were uprooted and an estimated 1 million were killed. Bitterness was reinforced by three wars and the division of Kashmir, the Himalayan territory both countries claim in its entirety.
Both Musharraf and Singh are stressing good will. They spoke for 20 minutes by phone May 23 and said they want to keep talking.
The sense of urgency is strongest in Kashmir, where a separatist insurgency launched in 1989 has claimed some 65,000 lives and morphed into a front of Islamic extremist holy war in the Indian-ruled portion. On the day Singh and Musharraf spoke by phone, a land mine in Kashmir killed 29 people in a bus.
n India and Pakistan will meet this month for talks aimed at resolving their bitter dispute over Kashmir and improving nuclear security, Indian Foreign Minister Natwar Singh said Tuesday, Reuters reported.
Natwar Singh dismissed fears that the peace process would stall under India’s new Congress-led government, and tried to dampen a public dispute between the nuclear-armed neighbors that broke out just days after he took office.
He said experts from both countries would meet on June 19 and 20 for talks on nuclear confidence-building measures, while foreign secretaries would meet in the same place on June 27 and 28. Pakistan said it had accepted India’s invitation to hold both sets of talks in the Indian capital, New Delhi.
Natwar Singh brushed aside fears that Congress, which ruled India for most of the four decades after independence in 1947 and led the country into three wars with Pakistan, would be unable to shake off the baggage of the past.
“The future of India-Pakistan relations no longer lies in the past,” he said. “We cannot forget the past, but neither should we be prisoners of the past.”
Associated Press correspondent Beth Duff-Brown in New Delhi contributed to this report.