Border Crossings

The non-stop television coverage of the first run of the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus confirmed it: we Indians are obsessed with borders. More accurately, we are obsessed with borders of our own making, and with those that dwell beyond such borders as our ’other’.

The same other that we revile at moments of jingoistic nationalism, we embrace with tears of recognition at moments of reconciliation. The more we heighten and maintain our difference, the greater the emotion at our suddenly-rediscovered similarity. The continuing schizophrenia of Partition dictates our collective romance with the border, and the different avatars it assumes within the public sphere.

The media circus of April 7, in which the entire television-viewing nation would appear to have been a captive ringside audience, was one such avatar; the "sarhad-paar" love affair of "Veer-Zaara"
was another.

After "Veer-Zaara" received my third viewing, I recommended it to one of my Kashmiri friends. His response? "I’m tired of India’s unending flirtation with Pakistan. Please enjoy your national obsession but leave me out of it  we Kashmiris have suffered much on its account!" In vain did I explain that the film’s nationalistic ending, where the finally united couple cross over the Wagah border, (Zaara marked with sindoor, Veer kissing the ground of Bharat), had left me quite disturbed. My friend’s comment exposed how enmeshed I was in the very idea of the border, even when I claimed to reject it. As an Indian citizen, my identity remains demarcated by those lines drawn by the Radcliffe Commission. Short of changing my passport, neither Sufi pluralism, nor secular South Asianism, nor harking back to roots in east Bengal can alter this fact. But my Kashmiri friend’s seemingly spoilsport rejection of "Veer-Zaara" also highlighted something else. The same border bears very different meanings: it all depends on who is crossing it, and where.

’You can never understand’

This realisation hit me anew as I watched the news coverage of the journey of the First Srinagar-Muzaffarabad Bus. Two narratives were unfolding here: one of the divided Kashmiri families reuniting after 57 years; the other of India’s triumphant first fruits of long diplomatic labour.
There were two problems, though: the second narrative threatened to consume the first, and the television reportage uncritically supported this swallowing act.

For one famous face of television reporting, who had cut her teeth on an earlier, less friendly encounter on the Line of Control (LoC), this could be nothing less than a "historic moment for India and for television". One Kashmiri gentleman from Srinagar, awaiting reunion with his brother from the other side, voiced the painfully obvious: to her insistent question, "what do you feel at this moment?" he replied, "what I am feeling now, YOU can never understand." Did we take the point, as a nation and as viewers? Sajjad Lone, the only separatist interviewed by the news channels, emphasised it clearly: "let us not delink the bus from the sacrifices of the Kashmiris."

Come on, Sajjad, don’t be such a party pooper, the interviewer’s response seemed to plead. We are having so much fun here. Why not join the game of collective back-patting? What was missing in the reportage, and (naturally) from the speeches of assorted political heavyweights at the Sher-e-Kashmir stadium, was any recognition of the all-pervasive tragi-comic irony of the "historic moment": the LoC as the joint creation of India and Pakistan. Two nations, born out of violence, continued through the first two decades after Partition to draw a line in the sand for their mutual self-assertion. Instead of bowing and scraping to the unabashed nationalism of the moment, why not provide viewers with some discussion on how the LoC was constructed?

We cannot expect the major satellite (and private) channels to aspire to Saadat Hasan Manto’s searing pen, which delineated the futility of the LoC-in-formation in his short story, "The Dog of Teetwal". But amidst the hype and the hoopla surrounding the First Bus, could not its attendant contradictions find some space for reflection?

Not-quite-internat ional border, but border nonetheless, demanding passports for its formal crossing, but only a passion for aazadi for its countless breachings since the 1980s: suspended between de facto and de jure status, the LoC plays out the continuing uncertainties of the Kashmiri subject position. That "mainstreamists" and separatists both agree  for diametrically opposing reasons  on the logical impossibility of passports for the bus passengers only highlights the immense complications the LoC generates.

Simply put, border crossings at Wagah or Jessore are a result of the irreversibility of Partition, and the consequent sovereignty of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. We may continue to beat our breasts about it, but these borders represent an accepted political status quo. The LoC is a completely different story, as yet unconcluded. The conflict over Kashmir is also a conflict about who writes the story of the region of which the Valley is the symbolic heart, and Srinagar the prize. The Bus represents a stark duality: to rejoice in the long-denied right to meet freely one’s loved ones is also to accept that someone else is, ultimately, fashioning the conclusion to that story. And this duality is part and parcel of being hostage to multiple claimants over a single territory.


Between the extremes represented by those coming from Delhi to flag off the bus, and those setting ablaze the Tourist Reception Centre at Srinagar, there are myriad shades of grey, constituents of an unenviable lived reality: being Kashmiri today. Whether Kashmiris in the Valley and along the LoC like it or not, they remain citizens of either India or of Pakistan, and at the mercy of the crumbs the ruling powers throw out at them when they decide to switch from swashbuckling to cooing mode. The humanitarian dimension to the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus goes beyond the obvious success of reuniting families across the LoC.

It calls for renewed examination of the processes whereby those families have been divided in the first place. Did the world indeed witness "a historic moment" on April 7, 2005, as was so continually asserted by the telemedia? If so, then we must remember, too, that history is made by victors, and that Kashmiris are not yet out of the danger of being on the losing side. Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali reminds us: "my memory is getting in the way of your history". Likewise, a responsible civil society should not let the greed for making history  and making news  get in the way of making memorable peace.