5, April 2005	Tuesday	25 Safar 1426

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window).

MUZAFFARABAD, April 4: For Abdul Rashid Butt it has become almost impossible to control his emotions ever since India and Pakistan have announced the launching of a bus service between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad after a long gap of 58 years. Mr Butt, 74, happens to be a passenger of what, he claims, was the last bus on this route in October 1947, a day before the tribesmen from Pakistan raided Kashmir to liberate it from its then Hindu ruler.

Born in Pattan on the other side of the Line of Control (LoC), Mr Butt breaks into tears whenever he talks about his birthplace and blood relations, many of whom, including his parents, four brothers and two sisters, have died since he “accidentally” moved out of his town to this side of the disputed state.

India and Pakistan agreed in February to restart a bus service between the two divided Kashmiri capitals, elating tens of thousands of divided families on either side of the LoC.

When Mr Butt’s son, Saqib, a banker, informed his father that the two countries had finally agreed to start the bus service, the response was unanticipated, rather shocking; Butt started crying like a child.

Until the authorities in AJK invited applications from the prospective travellers in mid-March, Mr Butt would daily query his son about the procedure besides reminding him to ensure his seat on the first bus.

Hailing from a business family, dealing in fruits and herbs, he was hardly 16 when he rode the bus from Baramula in held Kashmir along with two of his cousins and two employees.

The purpose, he told Dawn in a recent interview, was to check if their trading goods were properly unloaded in Kohala, Kashmir’s last town at its border with Pakistan, some 38 kilometres south of here. “And we never knew that we will not be able to return home.”

The bus they got on was specially booked by a Muslim League leader from Lahore to evacuate his family - English wife and three children - from Kashmir where the situation had aggravated following partition of the subcontinent, he said.

Normal traffic on the route was off as petroleum supply to the region had been blocked, he recalled. “A traffic police official, who was our family friend, influenced the driver as a result of which we managed to board a bus for Muzaffarabad and we alighted near the confluence of rivers Neelum and Jhelum in Muzaffarabad and took a tonga from there to reach Kohala in the evening. We stayed at a hotel in the Pakistani territory and learnt the following morning that the tribesmen from the NWFP had entered Kashmir to fight the Hindu ruler’s troops.”

He said their trading goods had also disappeared, and the situation compelled them to move to Rawalpindi. “There I studied in a college for three years, found a job, married in a refugee family from Jammu in 1953 and then moved back to Muzaffarabad in 1956 to settle here.”

Mr Butt was lucky to travel to held Kashmir thrice; first in 1968, then in 1985 and finally in 1987 through the Wagah border. He said that the journey through the Wagah border was hectic as it took at least three to four days and cost a lot of money.

Obtaining a visa from the Indian High Commission had always been next to impossible for most of the intending visitors. The bus service, which can take people from one part to the other in hours instead of days at a low cost, rekindled the hopes of the divided families to see each other easily.