Pakistan, Dussehra and Ganganagar

I am currently in Ganganagar, a relatively small city in northern Rajasthan. Right now, since my dad is posted here, this is home. There is not much to see but I’m staying in a beautiful, green cantonment full of trees, gardens and other flora. The reason it is so green despite being in Rajasthan is because the Indira Gandhi canal runs through it and the army maintains it very well. Most of the area of the cantonment is in fact covered by a golf course. There aren’t many people. One has a greater chance of seeing wildlife like hares, nilgais( who despite the name are a form of deer) and other animals than people while taking a walk after 6:00 pm in the night. It is also idyllically lit up at night, ideal for night-time excursions where one can think in peace. There is a theatre inside the cantonment where movies can be seen for free and I have access to a reasonably decent library, so along with my laptop, I have things to help me pass the time. The city is like a regular small town in any part of the country and it has amazing street food and very cheap good places to eat. Since it is barely 10 km from the Punjab border, the culture is Rajasthani but with a strong Punjabi influence and has a very significant Sikh population also.

One of the many examples of horrendous spelling in Ganganagar

One fascinating thing in the city is the many billboards and road signs which are paragons of bad spelling. I also saw the burning of the effigies of Ravan, Kumbhkaran and Meghnad on Dussehra for the first time in my life. Out of interest I convinced my parents to take me there and it was a colourful and entertaining spectacle. People dressed up in costume actually shoot a burning arrow at the effigies which being full of firecrackers burn up, explode and fall in spectacular fashion.

Effigies to be burnt during Dussehra

The highlight of my visit though was going to see the Pakistan border at Fazilka. Like at the Wagah border in Amritsar there is a post there and both sides hold a ceremony called Beating the Retreat which concludes with the border guards pulling down their respective flags in synchronized fashion. It took us around an hour and a half to get there in our army gypsy and I was following our route on GPS and gleefully watched us inch closer and closer to Pakistan. Around 500 m before the actual post there is some very dense fencing which my dad told me is in many cases electrified. No regular vehicles are allowed beyond that point. We got off and had tea with the BSF officer in charge there. We got onto a BSF gypsy and arrived at the post. There were around 50 people on our side along with the BSF jawans and there were many more on the Pakistani side which according to the BSF officer was because it was a Friday. There were loud patriotic songs coming from the Pakistani side, so much that it overpowered the loudspeaker on our side, which at one point for some reason was playing, “Kajra Re”! The Pakistani Rangers in their salwars and the people must have been 200 odd metres away so we could see them pretty well.

Jawans from the BSF during the ceremony

The ceremony soon started with guards from both sides screaming louder and louder, marching in perfect synchronization, getting their legs higher and higher and making weird provocative gestures at each other like some oddly choreographed military dance. Things were quiet at first but soon there was clapping from the Pakistani side with shouts of ‘Pakistan Zindabad’, ‘Jiye Jiye Pakistan’ and the occasional ‘Allah-u-Akbar’. The Indians were quiet for a while but then a lady in our crowd started chants of ‘ Hindustan Zindabad’ and ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’. The Indian side was hopelessly outnumbered though enthusiastic.

I and my parents though shouting along with the others were finding it really funny and all the chanting was more in fun than in any hostility towards the other side. Both officers on both sides stood up and saluted the parade of marching men. The whole thing went on for some 20 minutes and soon the bugle was being played and the flags went down synchronized to the inch. I thought the show was over, but there was one last subplot. The people from both sides were then allowed to come up to the thin barbed wire which marked the border with huge men on both sides standing in front of them to make sure nothing untoward occurs. Then it was odd, people were staring at each other like they were looking at aliens from another world, most would never meet anyone from the other country. I think one Pakistani started the waving, and soon there was waving and good natured staring very unlike the patriotic brouhaha that went on a few minutes ago. Though separated by a few miles, the appearance of the locals on both sides showed a marked contrast. Women were in a separate group there, wearing burkhas or covering their heads in lightly coloured chadars. And most of the men there were wearing salwars.

Pakistanis staring at us, and we at them

On the Indian side, most men were in jeans, the women were brightly dressed up and there was no obvious segregation. It was very obvious that this was relatively impoverished rural Punjab from the way ordinary Pakistanis looked to us while Fazilka is a prosperous district in a very prosperous state and it showed.

I had a lot of fun but I felt oddly philosophical after the whole experience. I’m known for my fascination with Pakistan and its culture and one day want to go there. As a child growing up in the Army my views were fairly atypical. We visited a beautiful war memorial from the ’71 war which was on the way. There you see the names of the dead, army men like my dad, who fought and died. The regular person’s anger is then directed at the enemy. For me, however the notion of a country, a stereotype of a people as an enemy is absurd and can only come when it has been drilled into you that a country is an enemy. Wars are huge impersonal things and Pakistan cannot be our enemy forever. One day we’ll be able to walk across the Wagah border with ease like this guy did. Till then, I can at least break stereotypes and blogs like this and this give me hope. The flow of information that has been facilitated by the Internet has given me a solution to a problem which I pondered as a child, how does a Pakistani child, the same age as mine believe the things he does, when it so obvious that we are right about everything. The answer is, no we aren’t right about everything, there is no black or white, there is always another side to what we believe. And once we all understand that, we won’t hate the ‘other’ as much.

Part of the war memorial where soldiers' ashes are kept

Finally, after all I had seen, the enduring image from the whole exercise was a bird, which kept hopping from one side of the border to another, back and forth almost as if to show the meaninglessness of the border for it.