Leaving the Golden Temple we proceeded now to the Wagah India /Pakistan border.
We were going to see the Beating Retreat Ceremony which has been a daily military event since 1959. The ceremony takes place every evening just before sunset at the border crossing which came into being when the Radcliffe line was drawn, separating India and Pakistan, and dividing the Province of Punjab into eastern and western sections. The eastern part went to India and the western part into Pakistan.
This is the only official road link on what is called the Grand Trunk Road between the two countries and which crosses what is the political fault line which is the Indian Pakistan border and which passes through a colossal , rather ugly concrete border with heavy metal gates.
So we arrived early, way too early in my opinion and now we had to sit and wait, sit and wait, sit and wait. In all that time all that happened was that a family was allowed through from the Pakistan side to the Indian side and they stood for a while with their suitcases blinking and looking bewildered wondering what to do next. Were they being ejected, had their visas been approved? They didn’t seem to know. Eventually they realised that the crowds of excited people were not there to welcome them to India and they moved slowly on.
I may have mentioned earlier about the visa application process which was quite difficult and asked several times about any connections relating to Pakistan and as I watched them step tentatively from one side to the next it all suddenly seemed to make some belated sense.
Eventually after something about twice as as long as the last Ice Age the show got started.
The ceremony started with a lot of singing and dancing and grand theatre and then a storming parade by the security forces from both the sides with a lot of bravado and strutting about. It reminded me of Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks, soldiers pretending to be Can’Can dancers at the Moulin Rouge and it ended in a contrived coordinated lowering of the two nations’ flags. One soldier stands at attention on each side of the gate.
As the sun sets, the iron gates at the border were opened and the two flags are lowered simultaneously. The flags are folded and the ceremony ended with a retreat that involved a rather reluctant and seemingly difficult handshake between soldiers from either side followed by the theatrical closing of the gates once again.
All rather odd. India hates Pakistan, Pakistan hates India. India loves Pakistan, Pakistan loves India. In under eighty years there have been four wars/spats between the two, 1947/8, 1965, 1971 and most recently 1999. It is like two people who live together but can’t get on and live together, How can a foreign visitor make any sense of that I wonder?
The tension spills over into sport. India and Pakistan are two of the greatest cricket teams in the World but they don’t play each other except at neutral venues. Since Partition only one Hindu has ever represented Pakistan and only seventeen Muslims have represented India despite the fact that India has the third highest Muslim population in the World. Pakistan cricketers are excluded from the Indian Premier League for political and religious reasons. How absurd is that?
It was all a complete pantomime. Ridiculous really but to be fair I didn’t understand the relevance of it. A bit of trivia for you, the word ‘pak’ means pure in Persian and ”istan’ means land of so Pakistan is literally ‘land of purity’. That is a very bold claim.
I asked Tour Guide Rahi about it and he was certain that Partition was entirely the fault of the British, their policy of divide and rule that set Muslim against Hindu and led to the events of 1947 which must surely go down as one of the major humanitarian tragedies of the twentieth century when hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and slaughtered for not even a very good reason.
India and Pakistan were separated in 1947 as the British withdrew from India. It suits to blame the British and their admittedly clueless, clumsy and uninformed division of the sub-continent but surely others were equally complicit in a defiant statement of intent firmly set against compromise. Viceroy Mountbatten gave up the attempt, referred it back to London and it all ended up going tits up.
I personally didn’t enjoy it, I thought the visit a complete waste of time, I had known about the tension between India and Pakistan but I would have preferred to have visited the Partition Museum but that seemed to get quietly dropped from the itinerary. I would have preferred to return to the Golden Temple at Sunset but that too seemed to get quietly dropped from the itinerary so had to stick instead with the pantomime ceremony right through to the end.
I would most especially liked to go and see a cricket match between India and Pakistan. No chance of that of course.
What happened to these main players? Ghandi of course was assassinated in 1948, Earl Mountbatten suffered the same fate in 1979, blown up by an IRA bomb, Jinnah was a chain smoker (fifty a day, or one every fifteen minutes based on a twelve hour day because you can’t smoke when you are asleep because you will set fire to the bed) and died of lung disease in 1948, Nehru lived until 1964 and died of a heart attack.
Cyril Radcliffe who drew the line which became the border was so saddened by the violence and death that his line had caused that he refused to draw his salary (£3,000 in 1947 or about £145,000 in 2024 values) and returned to England where he was created a Lord. Some things never change and reward for failure is one of them. He lived a long life until 1977.
When it was all over (thank goodness) we returned to the hotel, relaxed for a while before going to the dining room for another curry. I had now had more curry in one week than I had had in the last ten years, maybe twenty years.
Tomorrow there was a long coach journey ahead across the Punjab from Amritsar to Chandrigarh but on the plus side there was a later start.
Have Bag, Will Travel 