A journey to the other side

The reason, say Surface Transport Ministry officials, is that a draft agreement was sent last week and Pakistan is yet to get back. The Ministry of External Affairs says the same thing. The Cabinet will clear it in a day, they say, and the bus will hit the road. But first, the agreement has to come.

This may sound like a blame game but it isn’t. In fact, for the Delhi Transport Corporation, which will run the service, a delay means more time to make the bus look smarter. So, in a workshop in North Delhi, where the bus is getting a fresh coat of white paint, the rough edges can now be smoothened just that little bit extra.

As for Pakistan, its additional foreign secretary Tariq Altaf, who is in New Delhi for bilateral talks, says that they too are making “hectic efforts” to get the show on the road. “We are trying to find out who would be interested in running the bus service as a business proposition and will soon work out the details,” he told The Indian Express.

He says a bus service is what’s needed since air travel is expensive and there have been several complaints about the Samjhauta Express — the bi-weekly train service running from New Delhi to Attari….

Reported by Ritu Sarin, `The Indian Express’, November 6, 1998

NEW DELHI, FEBRUARY 18: Perhaps, never before since Henry Ford built his model-T has an automobile been expected to break so many barriers. And the bus to Lahore is already on its way to doing so at Wagah on Saturday.

The golden-brown luxury coach — with the Indian tricolour painted on the sides and `Sada-e-Sarhad’ (call of the border) inscribed next to the Indian and Pakistan flags embossed below the front windshield — left for Amritsar this evening.

It will wait there till Saturday for its first celebrity passenger, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. And this will mark the beginning of the Delhi-Lahore four-day-a-week bus service: the Golden Jubilee Service of the Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC). On Saturday, the bus will go up to Wagah from where Vajpayee will travel by a helicopter.

DTC officials proudly displayed the bus before Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit in the Old Secretariat today before it left for Amritsar. “It is a historic occasion, a big step towards improving Indo-Pak relations,” said Dikshit….

Reported by Jyoti Malhotra, `The Indian Express’, February 19, 1999