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Days after the recent skirmishes at the Line of Control, when the composite dialogue between India and Pakistan was threatened, an alternative reconciliation was underway in Lahore. Music became the metaphor of shared ground between the two countries, challenging divides between them that can become violent.
If you live in Lahore and choose to go North-West, you will be in Gujrawala in about an hour’s time. And if you move from Lahore to the East, on the same Grand Trunk (GT) Road which Sher Shah Suri, the Afghan Warrior-King, carved out, in about the same time you could be standing in Amritsar—except for the ordeal of crossing the Indo-Pakistan border.
Since 1947, Kashmir had been offered toffees and chocolates to stop its tears as one does this to a small kid weeping. No one realized that the agony of Kashmiris lies deep inside their hearts. Since last 17 years of insurgency, approximately 100,000 people have been killed. Thousands of young boys and men between the ages of 15-65 were taken to the custody for investigation by security forces but their return remains uncertainty for their families.
“They are like my two eyes,” says the fabled Pakistani folk singer Reshma, speaking of India, the country of her birth in 1947, and the country she has lived in since infancy. Similar emotions are echoed by another lauded singer, the Mumbai-based Seema Anil Sehgal, known as the ‘Bulbul (nightingale) of Jammu and Kashmir’. Last May (2004), she dedicated her CD, recorded at the first ever concert in Mumbai on the poetry of Allama Iqbal, the man credited with the idea of Pakistan, to “India-Pakistan friendship”.
Blame for the problems of Afghanistan is widespread. The Pakistanis are at fault; no, the Afghans; no, the United States. NATO isn't stepping up to the plate. Is it the Taliban, Al Qaeda, or Pakistan's intelligence service that is pulling the strings? Is President Hamid Karzai powerless, or is he boosting the warlords, or is he a puppet for Americans, or all three? But a large part of the problem is being missed. There is talk about the U.S.-Pakistan-Afghanistan tripartite, but it's the wrong focus. The focus should be on the Afghanistan-Pakistan-India triangle.
In November 2006 I visited Lahore, as a guest of the Pakistan Association of Pathologists to deliver the keynote address at their annual convention. This is my account of that visit.
