The Indian Equator

by Ian Strathcarron

  (I still find it amazing that the British should have built New Delhi at all, let alone built it so generously: they must have known by 1911 that the end was nigh, yet they chose to build this one last magnificent statement, nothing less than a capital city, in honor of empire and their idea of good government. Any other imperial power would have taken the money and run - although there are many Indians who would suggest the British already had.)

  In Twain’s time the bungalows were occupied by the great and the good of Delhi. Now they are occupied by the officers of the dozens of lesser spotted government departments that Indian bureaucracy spawns; it has become a sort of civic cantonment. Next to Maidan’s is the Indian Police Officers’ Mess - the same officers whose average wage is $2,500 a year but who drive up to the mess in cars worth an average $25,000. Maybe they all play the lottery and win every week.

  Their next stop on the Delhi tour was the famous Kashmere Gate, famous for its elegant symmetry and famous for being a bloody witness to some of the toughest battles in the Sepoy Uprising. For three hundred years before the British arrived Delhi had been the capital of Moghul India and its most famous builder, the Taj Mahal’s Shah Jahan, had built a wall around what was then called Shahjananabad. The Red Fort red-stone wall is beautifully sculptured, both decorative and defendable. In retrospect, the one-and-a-half-mile wall was more decorative than defendable. Fifty years after it was finished, with the Moghul Empire in decadent decline, the Persian Emperor Nadir Shah (whose first name lives on to describe a low point) sacked Delhi and massacred over one hundred thousand of its inhabitants in one night in a Christian crusader-style killing spree. It was with this memory still fresh that the East India Company was welcomed, initially at any rate, by the remnants of Moghul Delhi.

  The Kashmere Gate now has the misfortune to be under the care of the nincompoops of the Archaeological Survey of India and as such combines the worst of all worlds: reliance on officialdom and hostility to visitors. There is no sign of the fighting that took place there and it is now just another bashed-up ruin heading towards a rubbly future. The British started the vandalism in the Red Fort itself immediately after the Sepoy Uprising was put down, demolishing the old harem and out-palaces and building a row of completely inappropriate barracks. But worse is seen all around its walls: the immediately adjacent section of the old Moghul wall at Kashmere Gate has been bulldozed to make way for a massive and meritless concrete monstrosity, a shopping mall-cum-metro station. The Barbarians have been at the Gates since 1856 but are now fuelled by revenge and bulldozers rather than revenge and philistinism.

  Next to the still-proud Kashmere Gate was the grave and pedestal to Brigadier General John Nicholson. Never was there a better example of history being open to interpretation. To the British of the time, especially back home, he was the Hero of Delhi; to the Indians of the time he was the Butcher of Delhi[79]; it is safe to say now that all agree he was a thoroughly unpleasant man who happened to be a brilliant soldier - not the first one of that particular breed. After Independence the new government decided to move his grave out of India and sent it back to Ulster, to his old school, the Royal Dungannon.

  ***

  Whilst in Delhi Gillian and I have to apply for a Pakistani visa at the local High Commission. Sita has no wish to go behind enemy lines and the enemy probably wouldn’t let her in anyway.

  One needs at least a tourist visa to enter Pakistan but it soon becomes clear they don’t really want any tourists - at least not in a joined-up thinking kind of way - and they don’t really like issuing visas much either.

  I started - and gave up - the process in London. There in Knightsbridge stands the beautiful Regency building that is the Pakistani High Commission. The High Commission had a visa department; so far so good. I went through a gate into the gardens and found a scene resembling a refugee camp. There were five tents marked A, B, C, D and E. There was no explanation for the system and no lines within any of the tents, just a mad scramble. On the other side of the garden was an open-air desk with piles of forms in English and Urdu. It had been sprinkling rain London-style on and off all morning and the top ones were soaked; they were held in a pile by a broken brick which had left its crumbs all over the place.

  I asked a fellow lost-looking-soul, a Pakistani, if he knew what was happening. He said, you fill in the form three times, add the photos, and take them to the correct line. Ah, but how do you know which is that line? He shrugged and said he had heard that in theory A was for enquiries, B and C were for handing in the forms in Urdu and English, and D and E were for collections, but in practice everyone just piled into what seemed like the shortest line.

  I had already printed off our forms from the High Commission website and attached our photos so I joined the end of the jumble of the C line. There were no ropes separating the lines and people were jostling and pushing and raising their voices not only within each so-called line but across lines too. There was no point in being English about this; the tactics were arms and elbows and the strategy pushing and shoving. After twenty minutes I was standing sideways one line back from the front. At the desk a harried look official - poor man! - looked up, saw a foreigner and reached out for my forms.

  “Wrong forms,” he shouted.

  “But I printed them this morning from your website”.

  “New forms now. New security. Forms are on the table.” He turned back and grabbed another sheaf from another supplicant. Case dismissed.

  This was a double disaster as on the internet forms it had asked that the passport photos be glued to each of the three copies - and they were. Starting again was the only way forward. Outside the sprinkle had turned to London light and the forms were soaked at the top, sodden in the middle and damp at the bottom. I took three damp ones and retired home via a revisit to the photo booth to try again the next day. I had been at the High Commission for an hour and a half, plus a further hour to-ing and fro-ing. I am writing this in Delhi and have been in the Sub-Continent for two months - and two and half hours wasted hereabouts seems like nothing at all, almost time well spent. Western readers living in a busy capital will agree that two and half hours wasted in a working day is a lifetime.

  I tried again the next day, making sure I was there well before the 10 a.m. kick-off time. (They close at noon - no, I don’t know either.) The new form was a lot more detailed and complicated than the previous one, requiring notification in advance of exactly where and when one was going to be at any given time, as if every tourist was on a pre-arranged package tour. I did my best but there was one part with which I couldn’t legally comply: they asked for our last three months’ bank statements. Now, it’s illegal in most Western countries to reveal anybody’s bank statements, including your own. I wrote a little note to that effect and gave our banks’ names and addresses.

  It was forty-five disorderly, frustrating, barging minutes before I reached the front - or near the front - of the C scrum. The same poor man was there, dealing simultaneously with eight outstretched arms and four raised voices. He grabbed our forms, gave them a quick glance and put them on a pile. I asked him to check the bank boxes were alright as completed. “No problem. It’s just a form. Come back in four weeks. Phone first.”

  “Four weeks? You mean four days, it said five days on your website.”

  “That was the old form. Now four weeks. New procedure. All forms must go the Foreign Ministry in Pakistan.”

  I didn’t even need to think about it for a nanosecond; apart from anything else our flight to Mumbai was leaving in ten days. I took back my passport and forms and retired for a rethink.

  I have a good friend who herself has a good friend at the American Embassy in New Delhi. I had the latter’s contacts and she in turn was expecting my call - and dinner - once we had arrived here. Did she know if it was possible to obtain a tourist visa from the Pakistan High Commission in Delhi? Ten minutes later the phone rang. Y
es, no problem but it will take three days. Three days! Job done, see you in Delhi.

  Fast forward to Delhi. Scene: four days ago outside the Pakistan High Commission. We are in the diplomatic quarter. Delhi, like other artificial capitals such as Canberra and Brasilia, has such a quarter. Built around wide, gridded, litter-cleared boulevards and open, grassy, tree-lined spaces, the embassies crouch behind high security walls. Only the flags on top of the poles give each country’s game away. Outside each embassy is a sentry box, maybe two in the case of the American, and that’s it. It’s clinical, empty and quiet, except outside the Pakistan High Commission when suddenly, as one turns the corner into the entry road, one is back in India - except, of course, it’s Pakistan-in-India. There are squat tents, lean-tos, people sleeping on the pavements, dogs sleeping in the road, chai-stalls, litter everywhere, auto-rickshaws arguing, a kind of functioning anarchy - the general Sub-Continental melee.

  Actually it’s even worse than London as there is not even a hat titled toward the lining-up tradition. But I’ve been in India a couple of months and become quite accomplished at what would have seemed like ungentlemanly conduct two months ago. Push, shove, manhandle, elbow, trip, shoulder, fart, shout, then start all these again, repeat three times and I’m within shouting distance of the front of the ruckus.

  “I’d like two tourist visas please.”

  “What is your mother country?”

  “UK.”

  “Then you must go to London. Here is just for Indians.”

  “I can’t go to London. I’m here. Look, is there someone on the cultural or diplomatic side I can see?”

  “Are you a VIP?”

  “Yes.” Forgive me Lord, for I have sinned.

  He dials a number and above all the shouting supplicants and jostling hubbub speaks to someone and gives me the phone.

  The phone says: “Where are you staying?”

  “At the India International Centre.”

  “Give the man at the desk your card. I’ll be there at seven this evening. Let me speak to him again.” I hand the phone back to the desk jockey and give him my card.

  ***

  Like the diplomatic quarter, the India International Centre is in New Delhi but not in India, not in India-India; in fact it’s a UN and NGO outpost that doubles up as a Foreign Correspondents’ Club for visiting journalists. Into this oasis of tranquility, only half an hour late, wanders our potential benefactor. For the next twenty minutes, over a beer in the bar, he and I discuss my visa requirements and all the very many problems associated therewith.

  “But maybe there’s a solution,” he eventually says.

  I want to say straightaway: “Go on then, how much?” but years in Arabia tell me to play the face game.

  “Oh well, it would be wonderful if you could, somehow, you know, think of a solution. Of course anything I can do to help...”

  “Well, I have a friend in the High Commission. You see, he has family worries. His wife is ill and not able to look after his son who needs special treatment.”

  “And doctors are expensive, even here.”

  “Yes, that’s the trouble. Doctors. He cannot afford to pay the doctor,” he says.

  “I can imagine. Dentists are just as bad. Meanwhile his wife and son are becoming worse.”

  “Yes, nothing is easy. We feel sorry for him but what can we do?”

  A long pause into my beer glass. “If it isn’t too expensive perhaps I can help with the doctor. For your friend.”

  Another long pause, this time into his beer glass. “I see what you mean. That would be much appreciated.”

  “And could he help me? I mean, with my tourist visa?”

  “Oh, I’m sure that could be arranged. It’s only a formality after all, nothing compared to a doctor’s help.”

  Another pause, this time into my beer glass. “And did your friend mention a doctor’s fee?”

  “No, but I believe such an Indian doctor would be two hundred and fifty US cash.”

  “Would an Indian doctor take pounds and euros instead? I believe I have that much upstairs.”

  “Oh yes, I’m sure that would be quite acceptable.”

  “And if I give our passports when could I have them back?”

  “This time tomorrow.”

  And so it was done. I’m sure his friend’s wife and son made a quick recovery; for our part we have two six-month tourist visas issued three weeks ago in Brussels, Belgium.

  Whatever minor thrill there was at beating the system was tempered by the sadness of saying goodbye to Sita. Pakistan was not for her; nor she for it. She has been a constant source of amazement and amusement - and knowledge. Her last words are, “I really hope the book gets published” so if she is reading these words she will know her wish has come true.

  Lahore

  I am anxious - as ever - to not just follow the same route as Mark Twain but also to use the same form of transport. From Delhi to Lahore then was a simple and quick train journey on the Flying Mail, one of the fastest and most prestigious Raj train routes connecting Karachi, Delhi and Lahore. Not so today. Since Twain’s time we have had the disaster of Partition in 1947 and Lahore now finds itself in Pakistan. Between Delhi and Lahore the India-Pakistan border is one of the tensest in the world, especially now since roguish tendencies in the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency, have been shown to have sponsored the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. It is also one of the most poignant train journeys in the world, the scene of inter-tribal religious massacres just prior to Independence and Partition when half a million people died - and as many as sixty thousand of them making this very train journey, massacred along these very tracks.

  ***

  It is beyond the scope of this book to rehearse the events and massacres leading up to Partition except to make a few quick points as events today are still affected by the horrors perpetrated then. Between the end of World War 1 and the outbreak of World War 2 it became obvious to the more thoughtful imperialists on the ground that India would one day be independent; the “if” was becoming the “when”. As ideas and plans for the “when” were floated during the late 1930s the British and Indians envisaged one large country to replace the Raj; this would include the three countries that are now Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.[80]

  By the early 1940s a counter-move grew to have a Muslim homeland in the west and east of India and out of this grew the idea of a West Pakistan and East Pakistan. The one country divided into two only lasted until 1971 when a particularly nasty civil war resulted in the western half becoming Pakistan and the eastern half Bangladesh. The man behind the idea of dividing India, a brilliant advocate and natural leader named Mohammed Ali Jinnah, is now a national hero in Pakistan as its founding father; everywhere else he is blamed for, inadvertently, causing the horrors of Partition - and by extension the horror that is Pakistan today. (Interestingly enough, in view of these horrors, Jinnah was not a particularly religious man. Neither, for that matter, was his Indian counterpart Nehru, although both men used religion as a rallying point and power base.)[81]

  I think this common view of Jinnah’s culpability is a little unfair. True, he rabble-roused the groundswell that grew into the Muslim side of the massacres but by then events had spiraled out of his and everyone else’s control; once again religious fervor was humanity’s enemy. It suits all sides now - and Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs massacred with equal ferocity - to blame a British policy of divide and rule for Partition. That is a little unfair too as both Britain and India were equally aghast at the idea of a divided country, especially one divided along religious lines - the mixing of politics and religion as surely incendiary as a spark to gunpowder.

  The British viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, is now especially blamed for the massacres by his decision to bring Independence and Partition forward from 1949 to 1947, a date
at which Pakistan in particular was not ready for self-governance and way before the great twelve-million soul shift of populations along the religious divide could have been completed - or even the final frontiers of the divide drawn. If there is any irony in his defense, it is that he did so in an effort not so much to stop the massacres, which were already long beyond stopping, but at least to minimize the time in which more of them could take place.

  No one will ever be able to second-guess that decision but he took what at the time the British - and a great many Indians and future Pakistanis - thought were the two least worst options: for the sake of the Sub-Continent an early Independence and Partition and for the sake of the war-depleted British Empire an early cut and run.

  To travel along this train track now is to be reminded of the impossibility of a smooth Partition. There is no natural border. Hindu and Sikh families who had been living as far north as the Afghan border fled to Hindu-controlled Indian Punjab, while Muslims families who had settled right across the plains of northern India under centuries of Moghul rule fled to Muslim-controlled Pakistani Punjab. Punjab, now a state in both countries, could equally well be its own country, a Sikh country, as India is a Hindu one and Pakistan is a Muslim one.

  Since Partition the normalization of relations between India and Pakistan is what one might call a moveable feast. Pakistan has started, and lost, four wars against India. Both countries have armies they cannot (Pakistan) afford and should not have to (India) afford. Both have nuclear weapons aimed straight at each other. Suspicion and paranoia about each other come before reason and reconciliation. They are after all the same race of people; only their man-made religions - and whatever politically or culturally spins off from these - are dividing them.