Crossing the borders of hatred as the Punjab rattles past in a blur
By Peter Popham in Delhi
29 June 2002
Unless you have the funds to take a giant dog’s leg and go via the Gulf, the only way to travel from India to Pakistan these days is overland.
Progressively, the frail ties binding the dysfunctional siblings of the subcontinent have been snipped away during the past six months of tension.
The train service has gone, the darling of small-time smugglers and venal customs clerks; gone is the luxury Delhi-Lahore bus, inaugurated by India’s Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, with such high hopes three and a half years ago; and gone the brief, painless flight between the same cities, with bland sandwiches doled out by Pakistani cabin staff in headscarves, each sandwich with a glacé cherry or half an olive embedded in it as if shot from a gun.
India and Pakistan never got as far as linking their two capitals with a direct flight – lack of traffic was the proffered explanation, and probably the true one. But at least there were links, lines of communication, flows of people back and forth. In the name of India’s “coercive diplomacy”, all that has now been terminated.
The result, for the handful of people, including foreign correspondents, who still insist on going from India to Pakistan or vice-versa, is that the journey between the two capitals takes the best part of a day. You could fly from Delhi to Tokyo in less time. You could go from Delhi to London and be more than half way back.
The journey starts in Delhi soon after dawn. Fortunately – otherwise the trek would take far longer – one of India’s fastest trains, the Shatabdi Express, travels twice daily from Delhi to Amritsar, the holy city of the Sikhs, 12 miles (20km) from the border.
The Shatabdi is a new type of Indian train. It travels at 75mph (120kph), and its “air-conditioned chair car”, a rough Third World cousin of an Inter-City coach, is chilled to a couple of degrees above freezing. The cost to cover the 275 miles in the chair car is 735 rupees – only about £10 but a fortune compared with India’s humbler trains. And to make up for charging so much, the stewards in the pantry never stop feeding us throughout the journey, with mineral water, crunchy snacks, biscuits, fried chicken, chapatti, rice, dal, tea, ice cream, and more mineral water. This bounty is included in the price of the ticket.
We are travelling through the Punjab. Through the thick, amber-coloured double-glazing there is little to see of India’s wheat basket besides endless flat fields.
Amritsar is reached by lunchtime, and by then the privileged ones in the chair car have already eaten enough to last them all day. Amritsar, with its fabulous Golden Temple, would be a natural sightseeing stop if the temperature outside were not 115F (51C). So instead, I direct my spindly porter, who has hoisted my suitcase on to his head, towards the taxi rank and head straight for Wagha.
The line partitioning Punjab into Muslim-majority and non-Muslim-majority areas sliced in two the dead straight Amritsar-Lahore road 55 years ago, and even today the artificiality of the divide is obvious. But at Wagha they have made the best of a bad job: they have put their heads together and turned their mutual loathing into a show.
Every evening, as the border gates close, the 6ft guards on both sides enact a ferocious, intricately choreographed ritual of stamping and glaring and presenting arms, about-turning and stamping some more. It’s perhaps the only example of Indo-Pakistani co-operation to have survived the past six months. The two countries have gone so far as to build banks of concrete seating so their citizens can enjoy this futile spectacle. When I cross in the heat of the afternoon, however, the scene is torpid.
Bored NCOs yawn through the rituals of form-filling. Scruffy, emaciated porters gouge the best baksheesh they can obtain. Nobody is crossing here, nobody and nothing except an endless line of small, stitched-up boxes, borne on the porters’ heads: dried fruit from Afghanistan, bound for Delhi.
Tramping the few hundred yards of asphalt, watching my luggage relinquished by a red-coated scarecrow and picked up by his green-coated doppelgänger on the other side, I am into Pakistan and boarding another crumbling taxi.
And immediately a big city feels close; the small-town mood of Amritsar has gone. The traffic is several notches crazier. Small boys plunge off bridges into the chocolate brown waters of a canal. Donkeys stagger through the traffic, hauling huge loads of iron. The first town is called Batanagar, named after its prominent Bata shoe factory.
My destination in Lahore is the Daewoo Bus Station, where having put my watch back half an hour (Pakistan is on summer time) I board the eponymous Daewoo Bus, which traverses the almost unused Lahore-Rawalpindi motorway in four hours. No food, fortunately, but frequent servings of water and cola from an inscrutable young woman in a headscarf. And headphones, so we can fully enjoy the brutal Sylvester Stallone video on the TV.
I find myself seated next to an elderly gentleman in a starched salwar kameez – a homoeopathic doctor and sitar player it turns out, on his way to play in honour of the men behind Pakistan’s recent missile tests.
Our conversation drifts round to politics. “Ah, Kashmir!” he sighs. “I wish we could forget about Kashmir. Let them sort out their own destiny! We Pakistanis have enough problems of our own.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=310199