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| Make LoC travel easy | | | Despite all the odds and ills, stumbling blocks and road blocks, the cross-LoC trusk service is about to complete its two years later next month. There is an encouraging scenario as trade worth millions of rupees is being transacted every week, particularly on the Poonch-Rawalakote route but at the same time it calls for some honest introspections as what happened to the cross-LoC bus service which is running regularly but not carrying enough passengers. When India and Pakistan decided to open Srinagar-Muzaffarabad road for the reunion of divided families, the confidence building measure (CBM) was described by many as ‘mother of all CBMs.’ But this ‘mother of all CBMs’ had its many emotional ups and downs over these two years. Recently there was a case of a Kashmiri mother wailing and crying at Kaman Post when Pakistani authorities forced her to leave behind her two-month-old baby while travelling to Muzaffarabad. The incident reported in media suggested that a woman from Uri village of Indian part of Kashmir was among 24 passengers who had to cross over to the other side. Carrying her two-month baby in her lap, when the women wanted to cross over, she was asked by the Pakistani authorities that she could not carry the baby along as her name didn’t figure in the list of passengers traveling to Muzaffarabad. The mother cried, begged but to no avail. Although much hype was given to the opening of the road and it was portrayed as something different than the routine travel on passport and visa. It was described as a psychological reunion of the people who were divided way back due to dirty politicking. It was being shown as the emotional reunion of divided families. They two know that in a bid to meet the separated members of their family, they had to face one more separation, although a temporary one but no less painful. The governments of India and Pakistan have miserably failed to make people of the divided parts of Jammu and Kashmir identify with this ‘mother of all CBMs’. The procedural hassles that the intending passengers are made to face have killed the enthusiasm in both regions. The opponents of the opening of road and the cynics have been taunting the two governments by questioning that how many people have traveled to and fro on the road. They are right. Actually the governments of the two countries have provided an opportunity to these people to mock at the CBM. Thousands of people from either side of the divide have applied for the grant of travel documents but given the complicated nature of clearance, ninety per cent of the intending travelers are left high and dry. The cumbersomeness of the process has discouraged people and instead of applying for travel permits, they prefer to apply for a passport as that takes lesser time than the travel on this road. The two countries could have sold the CBM as a major psychological gift to the people of the two parts of the divided Jammu and Kashmir but they failed to do so. Now since there is some semblance of dialogue between two countries at certain level need is to make this CBM a people friendly CBM. Let the procedural hassles be done away with and the travel on all the roads linking the two parts of Jammu and Kashmir be made easier. Let there be no official on either side of the divide forcing a mother to leave behind her two-month old baby. Unless that is done, the CBM will fail to have desired results.
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