March 20, 2003

There are four sisters of what one should perhaps call Indian origin who are married to Pakistanis and are naturalized Pakistanis. The sisters’ father lived in a district town in India. He suddenly fell ill and died within a week. One of the sister’s lives in Abu Dhabi. She tried to get a visa for India from the embassy there but was refused. Those in Pakistan knew that even if they got visas, they would be able to travel to India only via the Gulf or Kathmandu, and working out the time required and the complications involved, abandoned any idea of going.

Once the grief had settled down, there was anger among the sisters. One of them said she would organize a website for wives of Indian origin married to Pakistanis and settled in Pakistan. In that way, they would at least be able to keep in touch with one another and perhaps create some kind of a pressure group to persuade Pakistan and India to ease travel restrictions.

In the aftermath of the attack on the Indian parliament in 2001, New Delhi had not only scaled down its diplomatic representation but also stopped bus and train services. The train service between Lahore and Amritsar was not a very satisfactory one. It had no one to look after it, and the carriages were dirty, overcrowded and often without lights or fans or water. But at least the train chugged between the two stations twice or thrice a week and took and brought back a full load on every trip. It provided a cheap means of access to divided families belonging to the lower-income groups. That link remains suspended, although how it is helping India’s diplomatic offensive vis-a-vis Pakistan is a total mystery.

The bus service between Lahore and Delhi, inaugurated during Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s landmark visit to the Punjab capital, was more expensive. But it had the virtue of being far more comfortable than the train service and was still affordable for most middle-class families. That too is gone, and on both sides of the border, the luxury coaches marked for the service are no doubt rusting in sheds.

PIA and Indian Airlines had stopped flying between the two countries earlier than the Indian decision to snap travel links. But the well-heeled and the well-connected can not only get visas quite easily from the Indian embassy in Islamabad but can also afford to travel by air via Dubai, with shopping in that commercialized Gulf city thrown in as an added bonus.

So, only the less affluent divided families suffer. The cynical view is that the number of such families is dwindling. Time is taking care of that. Parents and older brothers and sisters are dying, and family ties are weakening. They will weaken further as the years roll on. Therefore, why bother too much about divided families, the argument seems to run: their numbers are insignificant as a percentage of the total population in India and Pakistan and not worth bothering when it comes to greater political and diplomatic questions. But this underlines the streak of petty-mindedness that has come to characterize the Indo-Pakistan relationship. It’s all cold, de-humanized calculation, serving some vague state purpose on both sides.

The same streak marks so much else. Pakistan (definitely) and India (probably) prohibit normal exchanges of each other’s newspapers and journals. Books cannot be openly sold, and are pirated. The same goes for videos. Indian films cannot be allowed because our so-called Lollywood will collapse and there will be cries of “cultural indoctrination” and protests about what a columnist once described as the “navel invasion” from across the border, although the Bombay productions continue to be seen on cable.

Both India and Pakistan have reached the apogee of what is considered scientific and technological achievement — the manufacture and deployment of nuclear weapons. But both have regressed on the social and cultural fronts, and seem to display an almost juvenile immaturity when it comes to any kind of normal and civilized interaction. President Pervez Musharraf has just said in an interview with an Indian television channel that India and Pakistan should move forward and discuss all outstanding issues. Let us begin by at least restoring travel links and person-to-person exchanges.

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