I wanted to see Amritsar’s Jallianwala Bagh, site of the April 13, 1919 massacre by troops under the command of Gen Reginald Dyer of somewhere between 379 unarmed Indians (the number provided by the British) and 1,000 (estimate of the Indian National Congress), during its centennial year, but in order to reach Amritsar from Lahore, a distance of a mere 50 km, I had to walk the hundred yards of the only legal land crossing between these 2 nuclear armed countries, with a population between them of more than 1.5 billion.
It was a slow day at the Pakistan side, called there the Wagah crossing after the name of the nearest Pakistani town, and on the Indian side called Attari Road, after its nearest Indian town. If the two could not even agree on what to call their sole land bridge, a potentially rich symbol of harmony and co-existence, then no wonder it seems like a place lost in time and space, and an opportunity wasted.
Some of the preliminary partition maps drawn by the British lawyer Sir Cyril Radcliffe, whose several iterations on display in the Amritsar museum look more like a game gone wrong of Pin the Tail on the Donkey than a thoughtful exercise in doing the impossible, put Lahore and Wagah on the Indian side and Amritsar and Attari on the Pakistani, which if had come to pass would have modern day travelers from India to West Pakistan heading east, and those from West Pakistan to India heading west.
The Pakistani exit formalities take place in what looks like cavernous airport departure lounge, with most counters unmanned and a few clerks looking on with curiosity from adjoining offices at the handful of western tourists making the crossing. After getting stamped WLB, for Wagah Land Border, one walks the walk toward India through a No Man’s Land of empty bleacher seats, which fill every afternoon when the border closes with each nation’s respective hooligans cheering on their own side’s soldiers in a highly choreographed Beating Retreat Ceremony of in-your-face confrontations, high stepping, and security gate slamming.
Each side has found its tallest soldiers, fit them with 3 inch elevator heels and plumed turbans, and taught them to scream with a straight face in a nonlethal (and sometimes not so nonlethal- 4 1/2 years ago a suicide bomber on the Pakistan side killed 60 of his compatriots at the ceremony) game of chicken. Pakistan won the most recent “Who can build the tallest flag pole?” game, its is 400 feet high while India’s is only 360, but the Indian side’s bleacher seats are many times more capacious and its hooligans’ shouts are louder, syncopated with a drum-playing rabble-rouser seated on the upper deck. But at high noon even the dogs cannot stir themselves from their sun-soaked, border-bisecting siestas, and cautious travelers must kick up their own high steps as they pass over the sleeping hounds in order to avoid causing an international incident, or getting a nasty bite.
Entering India requires a bit more patience from travelers, who must wait for a bus to take them the 1/2 mile route to the immigration offices where bored looking officials carefully examine each passport- thankfully they prove to have a modicum of attention by not asking, Where are you coming from?- for visa stamps that might seem more dangerous than those of their nuclear armed and sworn enemy neighbor.
But the February 14 terror attack in Kashmir killing forty Indian paramilitaries almost lost Wagah’s cool, but not quite. The border was not closed, the Beat the Retreat ceremonies continued, and even the subsequent Pakistani downing of the Indian jet and capture of Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthanan, leading to a near code red among nuclear war watchers, did little to dampen spirits. Varthanan’s release a few days later at Wagah- the Pakistanis insisted on a walk-over, so it could all be caught on publicity tape- led to dancing and flower garland draping on the Attari side. I am still waiting for Pakistani friends to tell me how it all went down in Wagah.