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| ALONG BORDERLINE IN JAMMU | | ‘That smoke is from Pakistan…’ | | Manisha Sobhrajani | 8/8/2009 10:28:15 PM |
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It is quite needless to mention that the status of India-Pakistan relations has a direct impact on Jammu & Kashmir. And that any proposed ‘study’ on Kashmir is incomplete without the larger picture of India-Pakistan relations. J&K and Indo-Pak relations are not just inter-linked, but also inter-twined. Several events/ incidents have changed the dynamics of the relations between the two nations. The terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001, brought the two countries the closest they have ever been to a nuclear war.
Indo-Pak relations and the composite dialogue, or the lack of it, reached an all-time ‘low’ after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai on November 28, 2008. There was talk of ‘hot pursuit’, and war was a close possibility.
There is currently a ceasefire between the two South Asian nuclear powers, which came into effect from November 2003, under the then Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and the then Pakistan President General Musharraf.
A visit to the Suchetgarh border post a few years ago remains the high point of all my trips to Jammu & Kashmir. Suchetgarh is an international border post between India and Pakistan, and lies ahead of the R S Pura sector in Jammu.
It was an amazing experience. Though it is hard to describe, I will still try. The post leads to a huge gate which has the Indian flag painted on it on both sides. You open the gate and you can see a similar gate a few steps away, and technically it is in Pakistan, and it, too, has the Pakistani flag painted on it on both sides (I’m told!). Now between the two gates is the border, which is demarcated by pillars all along.
One of the pillars is an old and historic banyan tree, half of which falls on the Indian side, and the other half of it falls on the Pakistani side. It is very difficult to express what I felt at that particular point when I touched that Banyan tree. No doubt, it was a beautiful experience: something that I will cherish for my entire lifetime.
I have always contrasted this experience of mine with another visit to one of the border areas – village Laroka, Lam in the Nowshera sector. The area is just a few miles away from the LoC, and when I visited a school in the area, it was a unique feeling to see children sitting out in the open and studying, with no formal set-ups of classrooms and study boards.
One of the children took me a little away from his ‘classroom’, and pointing his finger towards clouds of smoke coming from a distance, and said: “Do you see the smoke... that is Pakistan...”. Quite honestly, I was speechless for a few minutes. When I recovered, I was curious as to what happens when relations between India and Pakistan are tense, and there is shelling and gun-battle in the border areas? The answer was quite predictable: “We have no school! We run away from our villages temporarily, and come back when things have settled.”
I later on learnt about the 50-odd villages that are sandwiched between the LoC and the Army fencing on the Indian side!
The Indian Army’s decision to build a fence along the 734 kilometres of the 742 km-long Line of Control was supposed to enhance the Army’s capability to detect and intercept infiltration and exfiltration attempts. The fencing had to follow natural topography and strategic considerations, as a result of which the fencing does not exactly coincide with the LoC. There is a distance between the fencing and the LoC, which varies with the topography.
So, sandwiched between the two lines are several villages -- Makri, Seri, Manika Maha Dev, Laam, Kalsian, Jhangar and Bhawani in the Nowshera sector of Rajouri district; Sekhlu area, Haveli Assembly segment and Shahpur Panchayat of Poonch district; Hathlanga, Chiranda and Silikut villages of Uri sector of Baramulla district; Chatkadiyan village in the Tangdhar Valley, to name just a few...
These villages, practically speaking, fall on the Indian side and not in ‘No Man’s Land’. The fact that these villages are outside the Army’s ‘protective’ fencing has given rise to immense problems for the locals belonging to these villages — since their land has been divided by the fencing, they have to traverse long distances just to till one piece of land; the fence can be crossed only at proper gates on roads, which are located at a distance of 500 metres to a kilometre; the gates open and close at fixed times: this is extremely inconvenient and humiliating for the local people, to say the least.
There is an overwhelming fear in their minds that if there is a settlement of Kashmir between India and Pakistan, if at all a solution comes along, India will give away these villages outside the Army fencing to Pakistan. This is, of course, a source of great anxiety and worry for the locals.
To quote my former boss and mentor M.J. Akbar, “The solution is not with us yet, but it would be fair to suggest that… The mutually-acceptable future border will be the present border: the line where the two armies ceased fire on the first of January 1949, and which they have guarded with such zealous ferocity for six decades. Six decades add up to two generations of lost sisters, forgotten cousins, and a relentless hostility that has aborted the potential of two nations. Everyone has heard the question: why do Indians and Pakistanis get on so well in a third country, and how come they do so well in a foreign habitat? The answer was always simple: because they were not living in India and Pakistan. Over the last decade India has begun to make such jokes irrelevant, but that is nothing compared to what it could achieve in harmony with a natural economic partner like Pakistan. It would vitalise SAARC, and set the subcontinent, which still has the poorest parts of the world on its landscape, on the long route towards self-respect.”
(Manisha Sobhrajani is a Delhi-based independent researcher working on the various aspects of the Kashmir conflict. She can be reached at [email protected])
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