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The Rediff Special/ Kushanava Choudhury

Part I: The intimate enemy

Improbable as it seems today, Lahore is only a half an hour away from Amritsar. But the frictions of nationalist histories have pushed the two cities into different planets politically. Amritsar is now Indian, Sikh, democratic; Lahore is Pakistani, Muslim and under military rule. Only 50 years ago, one could live in one city and work in the other. Once, Lahore was as much Hindu and Sikh as it was Muslim. Only the old names of localities -- Ram Nagar, Qila Lachman Singh, Krishan Nagar -- hint at the prosperous Hindu community that existed here once. Of the sizeable Sikh population, almost all who were not slaughtered in the Partition bloodbath have fled, to Amritsar, Delhi or elsewhere. Today, there are almost no Sikhs left in Lahore. Only the Sardar jokes remain.

In its 2,000 year history, Lahore served as an empire's capital only once. Ironically, it was during the Sikh period, under Maharaja Ranjit Singh, whose gurdwara still survives in the old city. In the 1980s, separatist Sikh militants -- backed by Zia ul Haq -- used the compound as a base for cross-border activities. The outdated banners on its walls still cry out: "Khalistan Zindabad." The gurdwara is flanked by the Badshahi mosque. Built by the Emperor Aurangzeb, it is a near replica of the Jama Masjid in Delhi. Facing the mosque is the Royal Fort, built by the emperor Akbar and used as a military compound by all subsequent rulers. During Zia's regime, the fort was notorious as a prison and torture chamber for political dissidents.

But history has a way of defying nationalist straitjackets. In Pakistan, the nationalist historians spawned by the Zia regime -- the ones who control all government schools, colleges and textbook boards -- declare that history began in 712 AD, with the invasion of Mohammad bin Qasim. The official nationalist history places modern Pakistan as a historical inheritor of India's Muslim kingdoms, from bin Qasim through to Bahadur Shah Zafar. Pakistan, so school children are taught, was created to escape from the dual oppression of British colonialism and Hindu hegemony and to resurrect the glories of the pre-colonial Mughal past.

Yet, Lahore was a peripheral city for the Mughals. The Mughal legacy of splendour -- the Taj Mahal, Red Fort, Agra Fort -- lie in its former capitals, all held hostage in India. Conversely, official Indian history -- which begins several thousand years back in the Indus Valley -- is Pakistan's hostage. Mohenjo Daro, Harappa, Takshila, the Buddhist and Sikh holy sites -- all supposed Indian treasures -- lie in Pakistani territory.

The quirky messiness of history lingers even in the modern lineage of both states. In front of the Badshahi mosque is the tomb of the poet, Mohammad Iqbal, the Tagore of Punjab. Iqbal is lauded as the ideological godfather of modern Pakistan. It was his nationalist verses that called for a protected homeland for Indian Muslims. Yet, for all the roads, parks and monuments that the state has named after its bard, his most famous verse is virtually unknown. Saare jahaan se accha, Hindustan hamara, Iqbal wrote, hum bulbulein hein iski, yeh gulistan hamara. The lines are familiar to every child in India, where the poet has been largely forgotten. Iqbal's nationalism (Indian and Muslim) was too complicated for the simplistic nationalist narratives in either India or Pakistan. So, in a stroke of Solomonic justice, one side has retained his verse, while another keeps his legacy.

Surrounding Iqbal's tomb, Lahore's old city, with its narrow lanes, roadside stalls and decadent squalor vaguely resembles Old Delhi. In the old city, one catches a glimpse of the kind of poverty that is ubiquitous in the Muslim ghettos in India's big cities. Pakistan is a very diverse country, deeply divided along fissures of class, caste, region and sect. But, for an outsider with preconceived notions of Islam as monolith, the fault lines are easy to miss. In Lahore, for instance, one notices that the very poor -- the menial servants, the homeless, the beggars -- are physically smaller and darker than most Punjabis. They are low-caste Punjabi Muslims, whose prior position in the Hindu social ladder still haunts them in what they can do, who they can marry or where they are buried. This is sub-continental Islam's dirty little secret -- for all its claims, the promise of Muslim brotherhood remains largely undelivered.

Despite appearances, class divisions are even more pronounced in Pakistan. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the role of women. At newspaper offices and think tanks, one encounters women everywhere -- independent, articulate voices, often in positions of considerable influence as editors and directors. There are women in General Musharraf's cabinet; women run publishing houses and influential NGOs. They write novels and direct plays.

But what is striking is what one doesn't see. On the streets, one may see smartly dressed women driving cars, but rarely does one see them on buses. Beyond the privileged, car owning, careerist classes, few lower class women enjoy that kind of independence. Many still retain the purdah. The literacy rate for women is abysmally low, quite possibly in the teens, according to some experts. Ghastly stories of domestic abuse, gang rape, murders of women suspected of adultery abound in the countryside.

"The killing of women has acquired a certain kind of respectability," said Aziz Siddiqui, a veteran activist at the influential Human Rights Commission, when we met in his office in Lahore. The Shariat laws, which Sharif began to introduce, seek to rollback family law -- with regard to women's rights to property ownership and divorce -- to medieval standards, under the guise of being true to the Koran. "If Islamic law is open to interpretation, then it takes power away from the mullahs," he said. "The Shariat laws are a kind of dogma that give power to orthodoxy."

Orthodoxy, under the guise of Islam, seeks to further shrink the definition of what it means to be a Pakistani. Instead of acknowledging differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims or Mohajirs (Urdu-speaking migrants from Uttar Pradesh) and Sindhis, the Pakistani state has always sought to fit disparate groups into one mould under the guise of Islam.

The resulting ethnic fissures, marked by Punjabi racial theories about the inferiority of the fish-eating Bengalis, were what had caused Pakistan to crack open in 1971 and produce Bangladesh. The Bangladesh experience, which should have suggested that the project of nation-building based solely on religion was fatally flawed, taught the Pakistanis something else: India was out to get them. The 1971 disaster created a leaner, meaner Pakistan. It is a nation that is more fundamentalist, more obsessed with exacting revenge on India for breaking up Pakistan. In the last decade, in the barracks and madrasas, that revenge psychology has fuelled the Pakistani support of the insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir.

Each day, for over a decade, the Pakistani public has been fed news reports of Indian abuses in Kashmir. Ordinary people donate money and volunteer to fight for the cause. During my stay in Pakistan, I could not find one individual, even the most ardent peacenik, who did not criticise India's stance in Kashmir. A decade of daily biased reports has formulated a uniform outrage.

The brainwashing is two-sided. There is a very real problem, rarely acknowledged in India, that the Indian state has acted like a colonial power in Kashmir. For years, and against the wishes of its residents, the government has installed several hundred thousand troops in Kashmir. Granted -- and this is seldom acknowledged in Pakistan -- there is limited support among the Kashmiris for Pak-trained insurgents or for secession to Pakistan. However, what is difficult to refute is that the government -- along with the insurgents -- continues to kill innocent Muslim civilians.

While daily reports on the government-owned PTV channel produced a litany of Indian intransigence in Kashmir, Shah Rukh Khan dominated the music videos when I was in Pakistan. The airwaves were saturated with the hit tune, Phir bhi dil hai Hindustani. I imagined soldiers in Pakistan's army barracks and street kids in Lahore, all swaying their hips like Shah Rukh Khan and the rest of India while mouthing, "My heart belongs to Hindustan."

India is everywhere in Pakistan. Over half the television channels -- from Doordarshan to Zee TV -- are transmitted from across the border. Indian movies have been banned from Pakistani cinema halls since the 1960s. But the thriving black market ensures that the latest releases in Bombay are instant blockbusters in Lahore. In spite of half a century of political hate mongering, Madhuri Dixit still reigns supreme here.

Even after 50 years, it is as impossible to escape Pakistan's cultural commonality with India, as it is to escape its political animosity with its neighbour. On either side of the border, it is this bipolarity -- of simultaneously sharing a deep cultural commonality alongside equally deep nationalist antagonism -- that defines the Indo-Pak relationship.

In those brief January weeks when I was in Pakistan, nationalist antagonism was triumphant on both sides of the border. Guns boomed as far south as Sialkot, as cross-border shelling continued round the clock. The hopes of amity that had emerged from the Lahore summit less than a year ago had vanished in the thin air of Kargil's peaks.

And yet, my experiences resonated most deeply with the cultural commonality that was evident everywhere I went. One of the journalists I had befriended at the Lahore Press Club was Rahat Ali Dar, a jovial photographer of Kashmiri descent who worked at one of the city's English dailies. Lahore is home to many ethnic Kashmiris -- Nawaz Sharif's family included -- who had moved into Punjab in the last two centuries.

One evening, I attended the wedding of Dar's niece. The ethnic Kashmiris I had met were, in most aspects of language, food or dress, no different from the Punjabis. But, here, their Kashmiri-ness was on dazzling display. The groom marched in to the tune of a brass band. The bride, who had been stowed away in another room, assumed her seat next to the groom. The maulvi performed a quick ceremony. The two families mingled, generously sharing hugs. Rosy-cheeked young women flaunted their bright Kashmiri outfits. The rituals -- right down to the bride's party stealing the groom's shoes -- were all Kashmiri. Sharif had outlawed feasts at weddings to cut back on lavish spending, so the hosts served an assortment of sweets and nuts from Lahore's best shops, and the pink-coloured Kashmiri tea.

I was sitting with Darsaab and a group of local journalists. The conversation flowed easily; there was much merriment and the cracking of crude jokes in Punjabi that someone would then translate for my benefit. The presents had been exchanged; the guests properly fed. The newly-weds were marching out of the main entrance with their families in tow. My host sipped some more of the pink tea. It made him nostalgic for the ancestral land he had never seen. "Enough is enough," he said to me with sudden melancholy, across the banter of our group. "Just let us have our Kashmir." The procession emptied out the wedding hall as the band played on.

Illustration: Dominic Xavier

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