October 10, 2022 • 28 mins
This week, Neha discusses the famous Wagah Border Ceremony, a daily military event that takes place between India and Pakistan. Later, she is joined by Dr. Antara Datta, a professor. who will talk about the borders at great length from a historical perspective.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Yeah, m. This audio is from a daily ceremony that
(00:29):
takes place between India and Pakistan that started in It
is held at the Waga Border, the most prominent border
crossing between these two countries. The last time I was
in Pakistan was three years ago. On that trip, I
witnessed the Wagga Border ceremony. My family and I were
(00:49):
visiting Lahore, located in the province of Punjab, which was
a major area of conflict during partition. Lahore is located
only fifty two miles away from India and my experience
at the border was unforgettable. From I Heart Radio, I'm
(01:10):
Nahasis and this is partition a podcast that will take
a closer look into this often forgotten part of history.
(01:39):
My family's last trip to Pakistan was for three weeks.
This gave us time to explore more parts of the country,
and Lahore was high on the list. It is filled
with stunning architecture dating back to the Mughal Empire. I
love Garachi, after all, it's where I was born, but
in terms of culture, Lahore has my birthplace beat. We
(02:00):
do have amazing food though. While outlining our travel plans,
my dad mentioned a ceremony Confused, I asked what he
was talking about. He told me that every evening, a
military event between India and Pakistan takes place. This ceremony
was one of the first things we saw when we
arrived in the whore, and it was the epitome of
(02:20):
a spectacle. During our visit, the air was filled with smog,
which made our journey to get there all the more formidable.
Cars were only allowed so far and we eventually had
to walk the rest of the way to the stadium
where the ceremony would take place. On the way, we
had to go through numerous security checkpoints. As we made
(02:45):
our way to the entrance, I tried to get my bearings.
Walking along the crowd to get to the stadium was
just very bizarre. I'm not sure how long we were
walking for, but it felt like at least forty five minutes.
We were walking on the same roads where absolute carnage
took place over seventy years ago. A shiver ran down
(03:08):
my spine. The majority of people I saw were filled
with excitement and anticipation to witness this tradition. I only
noticed a handful of people realized the melancholy of where
we were and what we were doing. Both sides of
the road were fenced off with barbed wire, indicating that
(03:30):
the other side was Indian territory. The land beyond the
fence seemed vast and endless. I turned to my mom
and said, is this the closest I will ever get
to India. She didn't give me a verbal response, but
instead gave me a look that conveyed all I needed
to know. As we continued our journey, I couldn't help
(03:54):
noticing the amount of school children that were there. I
saw many different uniforms. I wanted to ask if they
were from a local or nearby school, or did they
travel from other provinces. I wondered what they were taught
about the continuous strife between these two places. I didn't
really know how to feel during the ceremony. At its core,
(04:15):
it's a daily military practice for the Indian and Pakistani armies,
a forty five minute long sequence of marches and songs.
It's spoken of as a display of cooperation and brotherhood
between these two nations. In person, it was almost like
a scene straight out of Gladiator. Thunderous claps and cheering performers,
(04:36):
flag waving snacks being sold. Did my family and I
buy some popcorn, absolutely, but didn't make the concept any
less strange, not at all. The performance has two parts,
the beating retreat and the changing of the guard, performed
by the India Border Security Force and the Pakistan Rangers.
(05:00):
Respective sides were separated by two gates that open and closed.
During this theatrical production, Indian and Pakistani soldiers march in
perfect unison. The flags of both countries are lowered and
they partake in puffery and intimidation. Think of a male
peacock trying to attract a mate. The Pakistan Rangers were
(05:20):
black uniforms while the Indian Border Security Force were as
khaki uniforms, with both sides sporting pops of color. These
colors demanded attention with every hand raise and leg kick.
The gates first open as the sun sets. The flags
are folded after they are lowered, and a no nonsense
handshake takes place to conclude the end of the ceremony.
(05:43):
After the handshakes, the iron gates of the border close again.
During the entire event, visitors sing their national anthems and
chance slogans of Bakistan's in the body, which means long
lived the land of pure or victory to Bakistan and
jay Hind victory to Indian h Long live India across
the way. As I sat in the stadium, letting everything
(06:06):
in front of me sink in, I couldn't help but
think what were we all supposed to take away from this?
Is it all fun in games? Or does it build antagonism?
The idea behind it is to symbolize respect in addition
to rivalry between the two nations, But ultimately it's a
source of national and patriotic pride. There is no shame
(06:28):
in being proud of your heritage and where you come from.
But I think it's important to realize that our identities
are so entwined with each other. One does not exist
without the other. Our culture, language, food, and countless other
entities are cut from the same cloth. Yet decades later,
there are so much anger, bias, and hurt. As I've
(06:52):
said again and again, partition continues to haunt our daily lives.
I asked how these two governments can have a daily
ceremony together, a ceremony that started over sixty years ago,
when their relationships with each other are so troubled. I'm sorry,
(07:13):
but you cannot have a ceremony that represents respect and
friendship when Indian and Pakistani people are barred from visiting
the other country just because of where they were born
in familial ties. As I discussed a little later, it
wasn't always like this. This illusion of friendship, which is
really a disguise for hateful policies and violent rivalry stemming
(07:35):
from the British made border made me think of something
I noticed when my family and I began to walk
towards the stadium. In the distance, I could see both
India's and Bokistan's flags waving in the wind. My dad
noticed I was looking at them and said that India
had put up a flag first and Pakistan followed suit,
but purposely made their flag higher than theirs. I asked
(07:57):
if he was kidding. It's the to my mind to
look this up at the time, but when writing this
episode I did and he definitely was not kidding. In March,
India put up a flag that was three d sixty
ft tall. Five months later, Bakistan decided to put up
a flag of their own, but at four hundred ft.
(08:19):
The Hindustan Times reported in July that India plans to
create an even larger flag, one that is fifty ft
higher than the current one they have in place, making
it ten feet taller than Pakistan's. And I'm sure once
that happens, Bakistan will make a larger one and the
madness will continue. There are some, I'm sure who see
(08:40):
this news and feel a deep sense of pride or
find a comical I personally can't help but see it
as a waste of time, energy, and money when there
are real needs to be addressed. The majority of our
(09:03):
conversations on the border have dealt with how difficult it
is for many Indians and Pakistanis to visit the other side.
But why and what other underlying issues caused each government
to deny visa applications from people of the other country.
Since partition, India and Pakistan continue to have deeply tense relations.
(09:26):
Both countries have nuclear weapons and continue to fight over Kashmir,
even with numerous wars already under their belts. It should
be noted that the dispute over Kashmir and other tensions
between these nations are very intricate and complex, so for
the purposes of this episode, I'll be using a handful
(09:47):
of examples to illustrate how tensions between the two countries
manifest today. My research interests are about refugee ease and
borders in South Asia, and so as a consequence of that,
I'm obviously interested in Partition. That is dr ant an
(10:11):
historian and professor of international relations at Royal Holloway University
in London. I wanted to ask her about the border
from more of an historical lens. I first asked her
about these borders over the last seventy five years, they
have gone through different periods of accessibility. I have a
picture of my fraternal grandparents in front of the taj
(10:32):
Mahal in the sixties, shortly after my dad was born.
The likelihood of that picture being taken in two is
extremely small. First of all, the kind of whole visa
and passport regime has a much longer history. So in
order to understand where that comes from, I think you
actually have to go back to partition and both India
(10:53):
and Pakistan trying to work out, as I said, who
belongs and who doesn't. And in that process two things
emerged a forman system first and then a passport system.
So before the visas, they came passports for these people,
right and why did these systems emerge. The permit system
really emerges because many Muslims who go to Pakistan want
to come back to India and the Indian government is
(11:13):
worried because many of these people have left property behind
property to the Indian government calls evacuate property and was
going to hand this over to Hindus and Seeks. So
if these Muslims come back and claim this property, that
causes a problem. So they make them apply for permits.
And the permits that are given to Muslims are different
to the permits that are given to Hindus and Seeks
in this period. So although ostensibly Naru has declared India
(11:35):
to be a secular state, there is a difference in
the way in which Hindus and Muslims are crossing this border.
Even in Nhru was the first Prime Minister of India.
The passport system interesting is introduced at the behest of Pakistan,
but not quite at the behested Pakistan. But Pakistan has
a greater hand in the passport system. And the reason
(11:57):
they introduce it is because actually they are overwhelmed by
the number of Muslims who are coming into Pakistan and
in order to stop that floor, they introduced another document
that would make people's lives harder and more difficult. And
the way this plays out in the next sort of
a few decades is that both countries see crossing this
(12:17):
border are acquiring this passport as a sign that you
have made a choice. But again, as I said to
you in answer to an earlier question, people's lives are complicated.
So some people across the border and they make a choice,
and then they want to turn the clock back or
the acquire a passport. And then they say no, but
we want to go back. We want either claim property
or we're not happy here. We want to go back
(12:39):
to our own lives. And so if you look at
sort of Indian constitutional records as well as court cases,
there are many, many of these court cases about people
who are trying to claim citizenship, trying to claim passports,
usually Muslims, who may have made decisions to go back
and then come back again. So this history gets very,
very messy. Much like any situation in which there are
(13:02):
disputes between countries and governments, it all boils down to
who is in charge. So you have this regime of
permits and passports. That's first of all, creating this bonder.
Then over the next sort of a few decades, whether
the border is open or closed, as you rightly said,
is often a question of geopolitics. It's you know, down
(13:22):
to who's in power, who's not in power. You know.
So there was at one point of bus that went
to Lahore. There was a train that went to Dhaka, right,
So there's this kind of bus diplomacy that are trains
on the eastern side of the border. And then every
so often something happens like the Cargill War, and these
are shut down, you know. So there are moments in
which diplomacy opens up these borders and moments in which
the borders are closed. The Cargo War took place for
(13:47):
over two months, and it is one of the wars
between India and Pakistan overland and Kashmir. But what I
think is really interesting about the borders themselves, and I
did say earlier that we should think about the borders
is not just physical objects. But if we just see
them as physical objects, as people kind of stamping your
passport as you cross the border and so and so forth,
(14:08):
is that actually, as I said, the border in the
west has always been harder to cross, and In fact,
there was a time when post did not go across
the border. So if you posted a parcel from India
to Pakistan and went to Dubai, right because you paid
a crazy amount of But as I said, the border
in the east used to be open for a much
longer period of time. But that border has now been militarized.
There is now a barbed wire fence and India has
(14:30):
been in the process of kind of creating a wall there.
So the discourse around the border, around who is allowed
to cross the border has also changed. Whereas once upon
a time that eastern border would have been relatively easy
to cross. There used to be something called an Indo
Bangladesh passport, for instance, that you could simply used to
cross that border. So Hindus who had families either in
(14:50):
Bangladesh or we're living in Bangladesh and families and India
could simply use an Indo Bangladesh passport and vice versa
across that border. That passport was abolished, I believe in
two thousands teen or something. Ada points out what happens
within these countries is just as important as what is
happening outside of them, and I will argue that the
(15:13):
opening and closing of those borders is not just about
you know, who's in power and so on, but it's
also to do with internal politics, right about minorities, particularly
in India. And again if you look east, as that
border was created, that militarized border, that has gone hand
in hand with the writing of a new Citizenship Act,
(15:33):
a new citizenship Act that kind of goes back on
earlier conceptions of secularism and now makes India home for
South Asia's Hindus and seeks quite explicitly in Episode one,
I said that India would be home to the Hindu
Sikh majority, but it would also be more secular than Pakistan.
(15:54):
As Ada says, the amendment to the Citizen Act has
removed this notion. The Citizenship Amendment Bill was designed to
amend the Citizenship Act of nineteen fifty five to recognize
specific types of immigrants segregated by religion and country of origin.
Under the citizens Amendment Act, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Barsis
(16:18):
and Sikhs who had migrated from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Bakistan
to India prior to twenty fourteen are no longer considered
illegal immigrants. And have a better chance to obtain citizenship. However,
notably Jews and Muslims are left out of the amendment,
which makes this a prejudiced policy against the religions of
(16:39):
Islam and Judaism in India. This legislation led to protest
all around India for its blatant exclusion of minority fates.
(17:15):
So I would say these questions around who is allowed
to get a visa who is not when these open
up are also a product of domestic politics. And these
domestic calculations around which minorities are seen to be legitimate
and you know, how we can make people lives more
difficult internally has an impact on external broad acrosses, all
(17:39):
of these rules and regulations get further complicated because not
only is this accessibility based on yourself and your faith,
but also where your parents and grandparents are from. If
you are applying for a visa to India but your
parents or your grandparent was born in what is today Pakistan,
that's a much more complicated process, right. There extra forms
(18:02):
to fill out. This isn't just about your passport or
your nationality. There is a sort of grandfather and grandmothering
of these of these causes, and again let's deliberate. The
idea of identity politics really comes into play as more
time passes. But what's interesting is that in the two thousands,
(18:24):
India introduces an overseas Indian citizenship and introduces a person
of Indian Origin card and then overseas Indian citizenship. And
the way that legislation is written is very interesting because
technically most pakistani Is or many Pakistanis would be eligible
to become persons of Indian origin or overseas Indian citizens right.
That piece of Indian legislation is primarily kind of directed
(18:47):
at the wealthy diasport to try and get money back. Clearly,
you know, some countries like Fiji et cetera, which saw
invented labor from India were excluded from that list, right,
But also it was specifically written to exclude Kistan and
Bangladesation so on, so that you know, people from those
countries could not claim overseas Indian citizenship status, right. And
so for me, I think a lot of these conversations
(19:09):
are really really connected, these conversations about border crossing, the
conversations about diasporic South Asians, as well as conversations within
India about minorities. I think these are always intimately and
intricately linked. All of my grandparents were born in India,
which makes me a person of Indian origin. I can
(19:32):
trace this fact back several generations, I'm sure. But because
they were forced to move during partition and I was
subsequently born in Pakistan, this legislation does not apply to me.
I think a lot of people, as I said in
ninety seven, made a bunch of choices, not knowing what
the long term consequences of those choices would be, or
(19:54):
not expecting the long term consequences of those choices to
be what they turned out to be, and the ways
in which would be very hard to turn the clock back.
We also have to think in terms of privilege. I
think about this a lot when I think about personal
histories of Partition and the subcontinent, because the histories that
have been written and the histories that have been told
are so overwhelmingly upper class and uppercast. Right, the vast
(20:18):
majority of the people who moved were working class people,
and they had fewer options than many of the uppercast
supper class people who moved across these borders. Right, So
how you moved across the border. What you took with
you and then what happened to you after you cross
the border was very closely linked to your social status
before you cross the border. So even those Pajabis in particular,
(20:39):
who came across and who had very little, but who
belonged to a certain social strata or who had the
education or who had the connections, were able to thrive
in a way that many working class people struggle to
do so. And we know that that is particularly true
of the the Lit community that moved from Eastern Bengal
into West Bengal. Unther I mentioned the delt community, individuals
(21:04):
belonging to the lowest cast. We're at the point where
we're collecting all of these partitions stories where we're almost
sort of curating partition for the next generation. But whose
stories are we curating. There's some really interesting work that
shows that both India and Pakistan wrote that the Lit
citizens out of their histories, but were panicked because many
(21:28):
of these citizens did everyday jobs that the two new
countries needed people to do, so try to retain them
desperately while at the same time writing them out of
their histories. When we step back and we look at
these broader histories, gender, class, cast, religion. All of these
are so closely intertwined in how we understand, you know,
(21:49):
not just border crossing in ninety seven, but what happens
to those people in the next seventy five years. We
go on to discuss refugees and they're eatment in a
new place. I shouldn't have been shocked to learn that
who is and isn't considered a refugee also leaned into
the notion of identity politics. I think that's a really
(22:13):
important history of partition, that people didn't just cross a
border and become seamlessly integrated into the new nation state. Right.
And India and Pakistan both refused to sign the nineteen
fifty one UN Convention on Refugees, which defines who are refugees,
and the reason they refused to do that has to
do with the Eurocentric nature of it, has to do
(22:33):
with the fact that it defined refugees as emerging from
the war in Europe and so on and and so forth.
But the consequences of India and Pakistan not signing that
you still never signed it is that these people who
crossed the border are known as various things. Sometimes there
are refugees. Sometimes they're displaced persons in official discourse. Sometimes
they're migrants, and a lot of this is to do
(22:55):
with how they are then treated. So we know from
the exting literature, for instance, that the Punjabi refugees are
seen as genuine refugees because the Indian government argues they
fled violence and they are hard working and we deserve
to give them compensation and rehabilitation. Whereas these Bengali Is
are lazy and they did not flee the same kind
(23:16):
of violence that the Punjabis fled from, So somehow they're
kind of claim to refugeehood is less authentic, and then
they claim that therefore they don't deserve the same degree
of rehabilitation. But of course people keep coming and eventually
the Indian state tries to resettle them, and some of
these quite badly thought through rehabilitation schemes in Central India,
(23:37):
which fail because you can't just move people to arid
land and expect them to cultivate it overnight. But then
that's further seen as proof that these Bengali is only
one charity. They're not hard working like the Punjabis and
therefore truly deserving a rehabilitation. So groups of people who
cross borders at the same time their faiths can turn
(23:58):
out to be very friend depending on who they are,
where they crossed the border and the communities into which
they crossing too, right, And so those stories are really
really quite complex. Over the past few weeks, you've heard
several stories about people and their homes getting left behind,
and I wanted to know if I thought if there
(24:19):
could be a time where maybe the process for everyone
to visit these countries would be easier. Forced border crossing
in South Asia is traumatic, and when forest border crossing
everybody is traumatic. But there are some truly traumatic stories
in South Asian and that's seven one. There are expulsions
of stateless people in South Asia. There's kind of ongoing
(24:40):
trauma the Ranga is and so these stories are never
going to end in some ways, right, and in a
way I think that the kind of individual reconciliations were
subsumed within both India and Pakistan's original intention to almost
we raised partition, right, you know, we didn't have a
partition museum in India will very recently an independence day
(25:01):
in our fourteenth of August. In Pakistan, fifteenth of augustin
India is always focused on independence and then displaying a
military hardware rather than the trauma partition. And that was
a completely deliberate choice, right to raise some of those
histories to subsume them within this broader narrative, So a
sort of macro cosm of what happens at the Waga
Atry border, right, if you think of it that way.
(25:23):
So that's one of the reasons why those individual stories
have been kind of lost or don't get priority. And
you were asking what the kind of the future of
this might be like and what we can hope for,
and I can't predict that future, but you know, we
know that every time there is upheople in South Asia,
it creates more forced migration across borders. And you know
(25:44):
we know that for a fact, and in general, theoretically,
I like to think of borders as entirely artificial constructs, right.
And as someone who's lived on kind of three continents,
I was born on one continent, my children were born
on a different continent. We spent a lot of time
in North America. For me, border crossing has always been
an everyday part of my life. It's been an expensive
(26:04):
part of my life. But in the grand scheme of think,
my privilege has made it not that stressful, stressful, if
I'm honest, not that stressful, right. Whereas for a lot
of people in South Asia crossing these borders, and if
you can look at the kind of India Bangladesh border,
for people this this is a question of their livelihood
and every time they cross that border, they take their
(26:26):
life into their own hands in order to make ends meet.
So for me, I don't see an end to the
ways in which these borders have become securitized. I don't
think we're ever going to roll the clock back on that.
Seventy five years of violence and turmoil is a lot
(26:46):
to unpack. It's hard to imagine where you would even
begin to have this conversation. Both governments are aware of
what the people of India and Pakistan had to bear
when it came to partition and contain enuously. Closing off
these borders is truly an awful way to repay them.
There is no time like the present to make amends
(27:07):
for the past. Our next episode will be our last.
These past nine weeks, you've heard interviews from survivors, historians, artists,
and other creatives discuss how partition is a part of them.
But where do we go from here? How can we
(27:27):
take all of these thoughts and discussions and turn them
into actions. How has this tragedy taught us about what
is currently going on in the world. Education and empathy
are at the heart of all these questions. Until next week,
I'm Nahasie's and this is Partition. Partition was developed as
(27:54):
a part of the Next Up initiative created by Anna Hosnier,
Joel Monique and Yes Sinia mit En. Partition is produced
by Anna Hosnier, Tricia Mukerjee and Beca Ramos. It is
edited by Rory Gagan, with the original score composed by
Mark Hadley.
Yeah, m. This audio is from a daily ceremony that
(00:29):
takes place between India and Pakistan that started in It
is held at the Waga Border, the most prominent border
crossing between these two countries. The last time I was
in Pakistan was three years ago. On that trip, I
witnessed the Wagga Border ceremony. My family and I were
(00:49):
visiting Lahore, located in the province of Punjab, which was
a major area of conflict during partition. Lahore is located
only fifty two miles away from India and my experience
at the border was unforgettable. From I Heart Radio, I'm
(01:10):
Nahasis and this is partition a podcast that will take
a closer look into this often forgotten part of history.
(01:39):
My family's last trip to Pakistan was for three weeks.
This gave us time to explore more parts of the country,
and Lahore was high on the list. It is filled
with stunning architecture dating back to the Mughal Empire. I
love Garachi, after all, it's where I was born, but
in terms of culture, Lahore has my birthplace beat. We
(02:00):
do have amazing food though. While outlining our travel plans,
my dad mentioned a ceremony Confused, I asked what he
was talking about. He told me that every evening, a
military event between India and Pakistan takes place. This ceremony
was one of the first things we saw when we
arrived in the whore, and it was the epitome of
(02:20):
a spectacle. During our visit, the air was filled with smog,
which made our journey to get there all the more formidable.
Cars were only allowed so far and we eventually had
to walk the rest of the way to the stadium
where the ceremony would take place. On the way, we
had to go through numerous security checkpoints. As we made
(02:45):
our way to the entrance, I tried to get my bearings.
Walking along the crowd to get to the stadium was
just very bizarre. I'm not sure how long we were
walking for, but it felt like at least forty five minutes.
We were walking on the same roads where absolute carnage
took place over seventy years ago. A shiver ran down
(03:08):
my spine. The majority of people I saw were filled
with excitement and anticipation to witness this tradition. I only
noticed a handful of people realized the melancholy of where
we were and what we were doing. Both sides of
the road were fenced off with barbed wire, indicating that
(03:30):
the other side was Indian territory. The land beyond the
fence seemed vast and endless. I turned to my mom
and said, is this the closest I will ever get
to India. She didn't give me a verbal response, but
instead gave me a look that conveyed all I needed
to know. As we continued our journey, I couldn't help
(03:54):
noticing the amount of school children that were there. I
saw many different uniforms. I wanted to ask if they
were from a local or nearby school, or did they
travel from other provinces. I wondered what they were taught
about the continuous strife between these two places. I didn't
really know how to feel during the ceremony. At its core,
(04:15):
it's a daily military practice for the Indian and Pakistani armies,
a forty five minute long sequence of marches and songs.
It's spoken of as a display of cooperation and brotherhood
between these two nations. In person, it was almost like
a scene straight out of Gladiator. Thunderous claps and cheering performers,
(04:36):
flag waving snacks being sold. Did my family and I
buy some popcorn, absolutely, but didn't make the concept any
less strange, not at all. The performance has two parts,
the beating retreat and the changing of the guard, performed
by the India Border Security Force and the Pakistan Rangers.
(05:00):
Respective sides were separated by two gates that open and closed.
During this theatrical production, Indian and Pakistani soldiers march in
perfect unison. The flags of both countries are lowered and
they partake in puffery and intimidation. Think of a male
peacock trying to attract a mate. The Pakistan Rangers were
(05:20):
black uniforms while the Indian Border Security Force were as
khaki uniforms, with both sides sporting pops of color. These
colors demanded attention with every hand raise and leg kick.
The gates first open as the sun sets. The flags
are folded after they are lowered, and a no nonsense
handshake takes place to conclude the end of the ceremony.
(05:43):
After the handshakes, the iron gates of the border close again.
During the entire event, visitors sing their national anthems and
chance slogans of Bakistan's in the body, which means long
lived the land of pure or victory to Bakistan and
jay Hind victory to Indian h Long live India across
the way. As I sat in the stadium, letting everything
(06:06):
in front of me sink in, I couldn't help but
think what were we all supposed to take away from this?
Is it all fun in games? Or does it build antagonism?
The idea behind it is to symbolize respect in addition
to rivalry between the two nations, But ultimately it's a
source of national and patriotic pride. There is no shame
(06:28):
in being proud of your heritage and where you come from.
But I think it's important to realize that our identities
are so entwined with each other. One does not exist
without the other. Our culture, language, food, and countless other
entities are cut from the same cloth. Yet decades later,
there are so much anger, bias, and hurt. As I've
(06:52):
said again and again, partition continues to haunt our daily lives.
I asked how these two governments can have a daily
ceremony together, a ceremony that started over sixty years ago,
when their relationships with each other are so troubled. I'm sorry,
(07:13):
but you cannot have a ceremony that represents respect and
friendship when Indian and Pakistani people are barred from visiting
the other country just because of where they were born
in familial ties. As I discussed a little later, it
wasn't always like this. This illusion of friendship, which is
really a disguise for hateful policies and violent rivalry stemming
(07:35):
from the British made border made me think of something
I noticed when my family and I began to walk
towards the stadium. In the distance, I could see both
India's and Bokistan's flags waving in the wind. My dad
noticed I was looking at them and said that India
had put up a flag first and Pakistan followed suit,
but purposely made their flag higher than theirs. I asked
(07:57):
if he was kidding. It's the to my mind to
look this up at the time, but when writing this
episode I did and he definitely was not kidding. In March,
India put up a flag that was three d sixty
ft tall. Five months later, Bakistan decided to put up
a flag of their own, but at four hundred ft.
(08:19):
The Hindustan Times reported in July that India plans to
create an even larger flag, one that is fifty ft
higher than the current one they have in place, making
it ten feet taller than Pakistan's. And I'm sure once
that happens, Bakistan will make a larger one and the
madness will continue. There are some, I'm sure who see
(08:40):
this news and feel a deep sense of pride or
find a comical I personally can't help but see it
as a waste of time, energy, and money when there
are real needs to be addressed. The majority of our
(09:03):
conversations on the border have dealt with how difficult it
is for many Indians and Pakistanis to visit the other side.
But why and what other underlying issues caused each government
to deny visa applications from people of the other country.
Since partition, India and Pakistan continue to have deeply tense relations.
(09:26):
Both countries have nuclear weapons and continue to fight over Kashmir,
even with numerous wars already under their belts. It should
be noted that the dispute over Kashmir and other tensions
between these nations are very intricate and complex, so for
the purposes of this episode, I'll be using a handful
(09:47):
of examples to illustrate how tensions between the two countries
manifest today. My research interests are about refugee ease and
borders in South Asia, and so as a consequence of that,
I'm obviously interested in Partition. That is dr ant an
(10:11):
historian and professor of international relations at Royal Holloway University
in London. I wanted to ask her about the border
from more of an historical lens. I first asked her
about these borders over the last seventy five years, they
have gone through different periods of accessibility. I have a
picture of my fraternal grandparents in front of the taj
(10:32):
Mahal in the sixties, shortly after my dad was born.
The likelihood of that picture being taken in two is
extremely small. First of all, the kind of whole visa
and passport regime has a much longer history. So in
order to understand where that comes from, I think you
actually have to go back to partition and both India
(10:53):
and Pakistan trying to work out, as I said, who
belongs and who doesn't. And in that process two things
emerged a forman system first and then a passport system.
So before the visas, they came passports for these people,
right and why did these systems emerge. The permit system
really emerges because many Muslims who go to Pakistan want
to come back to India and the Indian government is
(11:13):
worried because many of these people have left property behind
property to the Indian government calls evacuate property and was
going to hand this over to Hindus and Seeks. So
if these Muslims come back and claim this property, that
causes a problem. So they make them apply for permits.
And the permits that are given to Muslims are different
to the permits that are given to Hindus and Seeks
in this period. So although ostensibly Naru has declared India
(11:35):
to be a secular state, there is a difference in
the way in which Hindus and Muslims are crossing this border.
Even in Nhru was the first Prime Minister of India.
The passport system interesting is introduced at the behest of Pakistan,
but not quite at the behested Pakistan. But Pakistan has
a greater hand in the passport system. And the reason
(11:57):
they introduce it is because actually they are overwhelmed by
the number of Muslims who are coming into Pakistan and
in order to stop that floor, they introduced another document
that would make people's lives harder and more difficult. And
the way this plays out in the next sort of
a few decades is that both countries see crossing this
(12:17):
border are acquiring this passport as a sign that you
have made a choice. But again, as I said to
you in answer to an earlier question, people's lives are complicated.
So some people across the border and they make a choice,
and then they want to turn the clock back or
the acquire a passport. And then they say no, but
we want to go back. We want either claim property
or we're not happy here. We want to go back
(12:39):
to our own lives. And so if you look at
sort of Indian constitutional records as well as court cases,
there are many, many of these court cases about people
who are trying to claim citizenship, trying to claim passports,
usually Muslims, who may have made decisions to go back
and then come back again. So this history gets very,
very messy. Much like any situation in which there are
(13:02):
disputes between countries and governments, it all boils down to
who is in charge. So you have this regime of
permits and passports. That's first of all, creating this bonder.
Then over the next sort of a few decades, whether
the border is open or closed, as you rightly said,
is often a question of geopolitics. It's you know, down
(13:22):
to who's in power, who's not in power. You know.
So there was at one point of bus that went
to Lahore. There was a train that went to Dhaka, right,
So there's this kind of bus diplomacy that are trains
on the eastern side of the border. And then every
so often something happens like the Cargill War, and these
are shut down, you know. So there are moments in
which diplomacy opens up these borders and moments in which
the borders are closed. The Cargo War took place for
(13:47):
over two months, and it is one of the wars
between India and Pakistan overland and Kashmir. But what I
think is really interesting about the borders themselves, and I
did say earlier that we should think about the borders
is not just physical objects. But if we just see
them as physical objects, as people kind of stamping your
passport as you cross the border and so and so forth,
(14:08):
is that actually, as I said, the border in the
west has always been harder to cross, and In fact,
there was a time when post did not go across
the border. So if you posted a parcel from India
to Pakistan and went to Dubai, right because you paid
a crazy amount of But as I said, the border
in the east used to be open for a much
longer period of time. But that border has now been militarized.
There is now a barbed wire fence and India has
(14:30):
been in the process of kind of creating a wall there.
So the discourse around the border, around who is allowed
to cross the border has also changed. Whereas once upon
a time that eastern border would have been relatively easy
to cross. There used to be something called an Indo
Bangladesh passport, for instance, that you could simply used to
cross that border. So Hindus who had families either in
(14:50):
Bangladesh or we're living in Bangladesh and families and India
could simply use an Indo Bangladesh passport and vice versa
across that border. That passport was abolished, I believe in
two thousands teen or something. Ada points out what happens
within these countries is just as important as what is
happening outside of them, and I will argue that the
(15:13):
opening and closing of those borders is not just about
you know, who's in power and so on, but it's
also to do with internal politics, right about minorities, particularly
in India. And again if you look east, as that
border was created, that militarized border, that has gone hand
in hand with the writing of a new Citizenship Act,
(15:33):
a new citizenship Act that kind of goes back on
earlier conceptions of secularism and now makes India home for
South Asia's Hindus and seeks quite explicitly in Episode one,
I said that India would be home to the Hindu
Sikh majority, but it would also be more secular than Pakistan.
(15:54):
As Ada says, the amendment to the Citizen Act has
removed this notion. The Citizenship Amendment Bill was designed to
amend the Citizenship Act of nineteen fifty five to recognize
specific types of immigrants segregated by religion and country of origin.
Under the citizens Amendment Act, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Barsis
(16:18):
and Sikhs who had migrated from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Bakistan
to India prior to twenty fourteen are no longer considered
illegal immigrants. And have a better chance to obtain citizenship. However,
notably Jews and Muslims are left out of the amendment,
which makes this a prejudiced policy against the religions of
(16:39):
Islam and Judaism in India. This legislation led to protest
all around India for its blatant exclusion of minority fates.
(17:15):
So I would say these questions around who is allowed
to get a visa who is not when these open
up are also a product of domestic politics. And these
domestic calculations around which minorities are seen to be legitimate
and you know, how we can make people lives more
difficult internally has an impact on external broad acrosses, all
(17:39):
of these rules and regulations get further complicated because not
only is this accessibility based on yourself and your faith,
but also where your parents and grandparents are from. If
you are applying for a visa to India but your
parents or your grandparent was born in what is today Pakistan,
that's a much more complicated process, right. There extra forms
(18:02):
to fill out. This isn't just about your passport or
your nationality. There is a sort of grandfather and grandmothering
of these of these causes, and again let's deliberate. The
idea of identity politics really comes into play as more
time passes. But what's interesting is that in the two thousands,
(18:24):
India introduces an overseas Indian citizenship and introduces a person
of Indian Origin card and then overseas Indian citizenship. And
the way that legislation is written is very interesting because
technically most pakistani Is or many Pakistanis would be eligible
to become persons of Indian origin or overseas Indian citizens right.
That piece of Indian legislation is primarily kind of directed
(18:47):
at the wealthy diasport to try and get money back. Clearly,
you know, some countries like Fiji et cetera, which saw
invented labor from India were excluded from that list, right,
But also it was specifically written to exclude Kistan and
Bangladesation so on, so that you know, people from those
countries could not claim overseas Indian citizenship status, right. And
so for me, I think a lot of these conversations
(19:09):
are really really connected, these conversations about border crossing, the
conversations about diasporic South Asians, as well as conversations within
India about minorities. I think these are always intimately and
intricately linked. All of my grandparents were born in India,
which makes me a person of Indian origin. I can
(19:32):
trace this fact back several generations, I'm sure. But because
they were forced to move during partition and I was
subsequently born in Pakistan, this legislation does not apply to me.
I think a lot of people, as I said in
ninety seven, made a bunch of choices, not knowing what
the long term consequences of those choices would be, or
(19:54):
not expecting the long term consequences of those choices to
be what they turned out to be, and the ways
in which would be very hard to turn the clock back.
We also have to think in terms of privilege. I
think about this a lot when I think about personal
histories of Partition and the subcontinent, because the histories that
have been written and the histories that have been told
are so overwhelmingly upper class and uppercast. Right, the vast
(20:18):
majority of the people who moved were working class people,
and they had fewer options than many of the uppercast
supper class people who moved across these borders. Right, So
how you moved across the border. What you took with
you and then what happened to you after you cross
the border was very closely linked to your social status
before you cross the border. So even those Pajabis in particular,
(20:39):
who came across and who had very little, but who
belonged to a certain social strata or who had the
education or who had the connections, were able to thrive
in a way that many working class people struggle to
do so. And we know that that is particularly true
of the the Lit community that moved from Eastern Bengal
into West Bengal. Unther I mentioned the delt community, individuals
(21:04):
belonging to the lowest cast. We're at the point where
we're collecting all of these partitions stories where we're almost
sort of curating partition for the next generation. But whose
stories are we curating. There's some really interesting work that
shows that both India and Pakistan wrote that the Lit
citizens out of their histories, but were panicked because many
(21:28):
of these citizens did everyday jobs that the two new
countries needed people to do, so try to retain them
desperately while at the same time writing them out of
their histories. When we step back and we look at
these broader histories, gender, class, cast, religion. All of these
are so closely intertwined in how we understand, you know,
(21:49):
not just border crossing in ninety seven, but what happens
to those people in the next seventy five years. We
go on to discuss refugees and they're eatment in a
new place. I shouldn't have been shocked to learn that
who is and isn't considered a refugee also leaned into
the notion of identity politics. I think that's a really
(22:13):
important history of partition, that people didn't just cross a
border and become seamlessly integrated into the new nation state. Right.
And India and Pakistan both refused to sign the nineteen
fifty one UN Convention on Refugees, which defines who are refugees,
and the reason they refused to do that has to
do with the Eurocentric nature of it, has to do
(22:33):
with the fact that it defined refugees as emerging from
the war in Europe and so on and and so forth.
But the consequences of India and Pakistan not signing that
you still never signed it is that these people who
crossed the border are known as various things. Sometimes there
are refugees. Sometimes they're displaced persons in official discourse. Sometimes
they're migrants, and a lot of this is to do
(22:55):
with how they are then treated. So we know from
the exting literature, for instance, that the Punjabi refugees are
seen as genuine refugees because the Indian government argues they
fled violence and they are hard working and we deserve
to give them compensation and rehabilitation. Whereas these Bengali Is
are lazy and they did not flee the same kind
(23:16):
of violence that the Punjabis fled from, So somehow they're
kind of claim to refugeehood is less authentic, and then
they claim that therefore they don't deserve the same degree
of rehabilitation. But of course people keep coming and eventually
the Indian state tries to resettle them, and some of
these quite badly thought through rehabilitation schemes in Central India,
(23:37):
which fail because you can't just move people to arid
land and expect them to cultivate it overnight. But then
that's further seen as proof that these Bengali is only
one charity. They're not hard working like the Punjabis and
therefore truly deserving a rehabilitation. So groups of people who
cross borders at the same time their faiths can turn
(23:58):
out to be very friend depending on who they are,
where they crossed the border and the communities into which
they crossing too, right, And so those stories are really
really quite complex. Over the past few weeks, you've heard
several stories about people and their homes getting left behind,
and I wanted to know if I thought if there
(24:19):
could be a time where maybe the process for everyone
to visit these countries would be easier. Forced border crossing
in South Asia is traumatic, and when forest border crossing
everybody is traumatic. But there are some truly traumatic stories
in South Asian and that's seven one. There are expulsions
of stateless people in South Asia. There's kind of ongoing
(24:40):
trauma the Ranga is and so these stories are never
going to end in some ways, right, and in a
way I think that the kind of individual reconciliations were
subsumed within both India and Pakistan's original intention to almost
we raised partition, right, you know, we didn't have a
partition museum in India will very recently an independence day
(25:01):
in our fourteenth of August. In Pakistan, fifteenth of augustin
India is always focused on independence and then displaying a
military hardware rather than the trauma partition. And that was
a completely deliberate choice, right to raise some of those
histories to subsume them within this broader narrative, So a
sort of macro cosm of what happens at the Waga
Atry border, right, if you think of it that way.
(25:23):
So that's one of the reasons why those individual stories
have been kind of lost or don't get priority. And
you were asking what the kind of the future of
this might be like and what we can hope for,
and I can't predict that future, but you know, we
know that every time there is upheople in South Asia,
it creates more forced migration across borders. And you know
(25:44):
we know that for a fact, and in general, theoretically,
I like to think of borders as entirely artificial constructs, right.
And as someone who's lived on kind of three continents,
I was born on one continent, my children were born
on a different continent. We spent a lot of time
in North America. For me, border crossing has always been
an everyday part of my life. It's been an expensive
(26:04):
part of my life. But in the grand scheme of think,
my privilege has made it not that stressful, stressful, if
I'm honest, not that stressful, right. Whereas for a lot
of people in South Asia crossing these borders, and if
you can look at the kind of India Bangladesh border,
for people this this is a question of their livelihood
and every time they cross that border, they take their
(26:26):
life into their own hands in order to make ends meet.
So for me, I don't see an end to the
ways in which these borders have become securitized. I don't
think we're ever going to roll the clock back on that.
Seventy five years of violence and turmoil is a lot
(26:46):
to unpack. It's hard to imagine where you would even
begin to have this conversation. Both governments are aware of
what the people of India and Pakistan had to bear
when it came to partition and contain enuously. Closing off
these borders is truly an awful way to repay them.
There is no time like the present to make amends
(27:07):
for the past. Our next episode will be our last.
These past nine weeks, you've heard interviews from survivors, historians, artists,
and other creatives discuss how partition is a part of them.
But where do we go from here? How can we
(27:27):
take all of these thoughts and discussions and turn them
into actions. How has this tragedy taught us about what
is currently going on in the world. Education and empathy
are at the heart of all these questions. Until next week,
I'm Nahasie's and this is Partition. Partition was developed as
(27:54):
a part of the Next Up initiative created by Anna Hosnier,
Joel Monique and Yes Sinia mit En. Partition is produced
by Anna Hosnier, Tricia Mukerjee and Beca Ramos. It is
edited by Rory Gagan, with the original score composed by
Mark Hadley.
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