Sitting in London, thousands of miles away from India, I was glued to the TV watching the progress of the inaugural bus service from Srinagar to Muzaffarabad. These were truly the brave, I thought, who, uncaring of the threats of the militants, were prepared to risk their lives to meet their loved ones again. How does it feel, I wondered, to not met your brother or sister, or your mother or father, for fifty years and more, even when they live but a few kilometres away? And, would I, if I were so separated, have the courage of those who boarded the bus on both sides of the Line of Control, to break the barriers of the past, and move towards the possibilities of the future?
It is easy to spout idealism if one is not in the firing line. The threat from the terrorists was real. The arson in Srinagar a day before the bus service was to start was a close call. The passengers knew that the militants are a band of indoctrinated desperadoes, so consumed by irrational hate that they would not be moved-like other Kashmiris-by the transparent human dimension of the journey. The threat to the lives of these pioneering wayfarers, and to the safety and well being of their kin, was, therefore, real. If they still remained committed to boarding that historic bus, it was because they were in no doubt that the opportunity to meet with their long separated loved ones far outweighed the risk to life and limb.
The human undergrowth that insists on sprouting all around the unyielding walls of man made political barriers fascinates me. I have seen this in many parts of the world. In Cyprus, the Green Line supervised by the UN runs like a gash across the internationally recognized south and the north occupied by the Turkish army. Two years ago the Green Line became porous, and people could cross freely if they chose to. There were mile long queues on both sides of the line. I was afraid that given their historical baggage of acrimony and hostility, Cypriots of Greek origin and those of Turkish descent might come to blows. But no such thing happened. People visited their long forgotten place of birth, were welcomed inside homes they had not seen for more than three decades, and met friends with whom they had grown up with but now could hardly recognise.
{{/usCountry}}The human undergrowth that insists on sprouting all around the unyielding walls of man made political barriers fascinates me. I have seen this in many parts of the world. In Cyprus, the Green Line supervised by the UN runs like a gash across the internationally recognized south and the north occupied by the Turkish army. Two years ago the Green Line became porous, and people could cross freely if they chose to. There were mile long queues on both sides of the line. I was afraid that given their historical baggage of acrimony and hostility, Cypriots of Greek origin and those of Turkish descent might come to blows. But no such thing happened. People visited their long forgotten place of birth, were welcomed inside homes they had not seen for more than three decades, and met friends with whom they had grown up with but now could hardly recognise.
{{/usCountry}}In Europe, during the Cold War, the Iron Curtain implacably separated people from people. But decades of separation could not extinguish the desire of the German people to unite. The Berlin Wall collapsed as though it had never existed the moment the opportunity came to pull it down. Ties of blood and memories of home may become dormant but can never become extinct. They will resurrect themselves if given a chance, and once they do they will prevail over those who believe in holding history to ransom in the name of terror.
The Partition must rate as one of the greatest human tragedies in terms of the sheer number of people it displaced. My wife's parents and family came from Rawalpindi. She tells me that her grandmother spoke of nothing but the home she had left behind until she passed away many years after 1947. A staff member who had worked with me in Romania once recalled that his father would till years after 1947 get up in the middle of the night and ask his sons to call a tonga so that he could return to the fields he had left untended on the other side of the Indus. Prakash Tandon in his classic work Punjabi Century had written movingly of how his educated father-one of the first people in Punjab to qualify as an engineer-would pine for the home he had built in the Model colony of Lahore.
Many other people have written about the Partition. The names of Amrita Pritam and Urvashi Butalia come to mind, and, more recently, I greatly enjoyed watching Pinjar and Veer Zara. But much more needs to be written to recall and preserve adequately the magnitude of human suffering caused by the great divide. And while this must remain a goal, let us pause to pay tribute to the courage of those who so courageously boarded the bus on April 7. By this very act they have done more than anything else to strengthen the resolve of the governments of India and Pakistan to overcome the hostilities of the past.
(A Stephanian, Pavan Kumar Varma is a senior Indian diplomat and presently Minister of Culture and Director of the Nehru Centre in London. Author of several widely acclaimed books likeGhalib: the Man, the Times and the recently released Being Indian, he will be writing the column Hyde Park Corner, exclusively for HindustanTimes.com)