by MARIANNA BAABAR
The crossing A Pak couple enters India
By putting India on the ‘enemies list’, India displays its blinkers
“Hum dono mulk phir se ek nahin ho sakte?” asks an attendant at a five-star hotel in New Delhi. “We are so alike, why can’t we reunite?” asks a white-collared executive in Bangalore.
When I laugh about the agony of reuniting with the world’s most dangerous state, they both respond, “Yes, but then we won’t need visas to travel to Pakistan.” But clearly India’s security establishment thinks otherwise, for it recently put Pakistan on the “enemies list” together with Somalia and Nigeria, and excluding it from the 180 countries that will be granted visa on arrival and electronic travel authorisation.
In which other country but Pakistan are there thousands of divided families, all yearning to visit their loved ones in India? I am also amazed at the sheer number of Indians one meets in New Delhi who still have family in Pakistan.
Recently, a scene at the Attari customs moved everyone who watched: an elderly traveller had to explain the gifts he was taking across for his family while an official rummaged through his bag. His first visit after Partition, his eyes filled with tears as he said to nobody in particular, “Even taking their names is painful, and my head is flooded with memories of the last time I was in India.”
“So India has eased visa rules for 180 countries. Except Pakistan. Confidence is a mark of big power status. Guess that still eludes Delhi,” tweeted Sherry Rehman of PPP, whose chairman Asif Ali Zardari had offered Delhi a historic ‘no first strike’ nuclear war policy. It has certainly been a slap in the face of the “over-friendly” Nawaz Sharif government, who as one former foreign secretary says is “sucking up” to the Indians via his “petticoat diplomacy”.
As the leader of the opposition, Sharif had in 2012 even suggested a ‘unilateral’ withdrawal from the heights of the Siachen glacier immediately after the Pakistan army chief had called for “demilitarisation” of the glacier after seeing hundreds of his soldiers buried under an avalanche.
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