We’ll come from Lahore and Benaras…

Finally, the great India-Pakistan thaw has begun and everyone on both sides of the border have welcomed it. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpa...

Finally, the great India-Pakistan thaw has begun and everyone on both sides of the border have welcomed it. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee spoke in Parliament as an elder statesman when he said, ‘‘There is darkness around but who says that a lamp could not be lit?’’ No one could resist applauding this gesture and even the known cynics found it hard to spit before the TV cameras their usual bites of doom.

T.S.Eliot begins Wasteland with the line ‘‘April is the cruellest month of the year’’. The earth is in agony giving birth to the inert roots which tear her bosom to poke out their tiny heads and become lilacs in the month of May. For Pakistan and India, the agony of April when the first stirrings began with Vajpayee’s statements in Kashmir and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf’s guarded responses, is over. The month of May has dawned on a new note and it leaves us common people, the hawks and the doves, with an incredible lightness of being.

Ali Sadar Jafri, the poet who staggered the public with his deep understanding of the Pakistan-India conundrum gave the most poetic call for rapprochement in his poem, Sarhad: ‘‘Tum aao gulshan-e-Lahore se chaman bar dosh/ Hum aayein subh Benaras ki raushni le kar/Himalaya ki hawaon ki taazgi lekar/Phir uske baad ye puchein ke kaun dushman hai? (You come carrying (fragrance) of the gardens of Lahore/ We come with the pink flush of Benaras’ early dawn/ Bringing freshness of Himalayan breezes/Then let us ask, who is the enemy?)

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For ten years, no matter how strained the atmosphere, the Pakistan-India Peoples Forum for Peace and Democracy, with chapters in both countries, has been holding people to people conventions in many cities in both nations. Three years ago when 41 of us women, from many parts of India, took a Women’s Bus of Peace to Lahore, we found nothing but warmth on the other side. Clad, in our saris, we were welcomed everywhere, in Anarkali bazaar, on Mall Road, in the katchi bastis of Lahore and Rawalpindi. If anything, our appearance provoked both interest and curiosity. When we made calls from PCOs, the owners refused to accept payment. The media seemed thrilled and gave us front page status. When two busloads of Pakistani women came on the bus Sada-i-Sarhad from Lahore to Delhi, the hospitality was amply returned.

We therefore wish to congratulate the leaders on both sides who have at last recognised the natural instinct of the people in both countries is or peace. Once the windows and doors are opened we can breathe freely, we can go back and forth by buses and trains — and, yes, we Indians and Pakistanis can light candles together at the Wagah border on the midnight of August 14 and 15.

(The writer is a peace activist)

Only 9 tickets to EBCs is in stark contrast to the INDIA bloc and Congress’s EBC push with the Atipichhda Nyay Sankalp, a separate resolution for EBCs that Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi and RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav released last month. (PTI Photo)

As Mahagathbandhan stalemate continues in Bihar, a look at the Congress line-up till now

Political Pulse1 hr ago

Congress manages to take three seats from allies in Bihar, including Biharsharif in Nalanda district, Kumhrar in Patna, and Bachhwara in Begusarai district. Congress fields 49 candidates, looking to contest 60-61 seats while RJD wants to give only 54-55. Seat-sharing talks stuck as Congress wants more "winnable seats" and RJD has not officially released its list.

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