Menon - Reporting Pakistan

The border is a fearsome thing God wot!

With apologies to Thomas Edward Brown

O n one side of the border was a cluster of shanties, and on the other, a hillock with ramshackle huts. A man in dark glasses, a Shiv Sainik, trying to be well meaning, pointed to the hillock, warning me not to go there. That is Pakistan, the mosques are full of bombs and guns, he said. Even before crossing the Wagah border, I was already there! That was the first of the many Pakistans I was to discover in Mumbai, miles away from the partitioned country. It was a few years before the demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992, the first time I was at the border. There were riots in Jogeshwari East, a suburb of Mumbai which has a long record of communal violence. I thought the man was joking; I had been to the other side of the border and families were mourning their dead and injured. He looked shocked when I questioned him. He had meant it kindly, for my safety. Pakistan was synonymous with any large Muslim pocket and, in Jogeshwari, the scene of some of the worst violence during the December 199293 riots in Bombay (it was renamed Mumbai in 1995), the border was very well defined early on. Hindus and Muslims knew their geographical limits and stuck to them. The divide was sharpened after the riots when the few mixed settlements emptied out. The devastating floods of 2005 in the city brought the communities together and Hindus and Muslims are now working to understand each other and overcome the past.

Behrampada, a slum outside Bandra station, in Mumbai, had a nefarious reputation and no one had ventured inside, not even to help the injured people during the communal riots of 199293. It was after an NGO went in and found people unable to get medical help and saw destroyed houses that the truth about this large Muslim pocket, which even today has Hindu families, came out into the open. In Mira Road, in Thane district on the outskirts of Mumbai, which many riot affected chose as their new home after the 199293 violence, the border begins as soon as you step out of the suburban railway station. A large road divides the Hindu and Muslim sections of the suburb, and there are apartment buildings where only Hindus or Muslims or their subsects can stay. Muslims are not welcome everywhere, an estate agent told me. It is the builders who decide the convenience of religious groupings. Brokers brazenly advertise their anti-Muslim feelings here and in Mumbai. Another central suburb, Kurla, has a large Muslim population and once while waiting for a function, I asked a vendor where I could get something to eat. Dont go ahead, he warned, its Pakistan. When I looked puzzled, he said its full of Muslims, you wont get anything to eat there that you like.

An electricity bill was delivered to a localityChhota Pakistanin Nalasopara (in Palghar district, originally called Tanda Pada); predictably, it did have a large Muslim population. (The area was often referred to as Chhota Pakistan by the local electric utility office but inexplicably it was legitimized as a postal address in the bill.) In April 2013, I was invited to the power-loom town of Malegaon in north Maharashtra to speak on the media and Muslims. During the discussion on stereotypes, one of the journalists gave an example of shoddy reporting that in a way involved Pakistan. A Pakistani girl was reported to be among the over thirty killed in the bomb blasts in Malegaon in September 2006. Though journalists covering the blasts had found that she was from Islamabad, a mohalla in Malegaon, no correction was issued. They were proud that during Partition, not a single person from Malegaon [had] left for Pakistan. Yet Malegaon, with all its history of fighting for Independence, and educational institutions, is labelled a terror hotspot. In reality, it is even more victimized. All nine men arrested for the same 2006 bomb blasts near the Malegaon mosque were acquitted after a decade in April 2016. There is an unshakeable belief that terror is perpetrated by Muslims alone, so the revelation that those from the majority community were involved in the blasts took a while to digest. All terrorists are Muslims but all Muslims may not be terrorists was a popular refrain of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). After he heard that I was going to Islamabad, one of my friends from Malegaon jokingly said that he hoped it was to the place across the border.

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Even before the line creating the two new countries was drawn by the Boundary Commissions headed by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the subcontinent had convulsed with hate-filled violence and distrust. The spidery tentacles of the new border went right into peoples hearts and minds, and stayed there. It became the line we drew inside us, separating the other. Pakistan became at once something dreadful and unpleasant, and travelling in Gujarat just after the Godhra train burning in 2002, my driver, a Muslim, asked me if it was true that all Muslims would be dropped at the border and asked to go to Pakistan. He refused to believe that it wouldnt happen. If an Indian says something that is remotely in favour of Muslims or against the so-called patriotic or nationalist notions of being Indian or anti-national, a chorus will start, Go to Pakistan, Send him or her to Pakistan, and so on. The legion of traitors and anti-nationalists who have been summarily dispatched to Pakistan is constantly expanding. Pakistan is a repository of people traitorous to India and the enemy is clearly defined.

The border is like a Lego blockyou can place it anywhere and create division; we dont seem to cross it easily and we dont need visas certainly but we never jump the fence for fear of finding out the truth. So the Shiv Sainik who warned me about the bombs hadnt actually been there, or the vendor who warned me not to go ahead wasnt sure himself, but they had an idea of Pakistan. There is an unshakeable feeling in the minds of many people that it must be a rotten place, anti-Indian, full of bearded men wanting to blow themselves up, and with guns and ammunition stored in mosques, burqa-clad women, and people straining at the leash to attack India. Pakistan, far from being the Land of the Pure, gives the opposite impression in India. The little pockets of Pakistan that we have symbolize those fears. And the war and proxy war with India over Kashmir and terrorism have only made things worse. Terrorism is inextricably linked with Pakistan, and shadows all moves for peace. In Bombay the 199293 communal riots became the basis for revenge in the form of twelve serial bombings on 12 March 1993. For the first time, terror came home to a city, already devastated by a prolonged orgy of violence. After the Babri Masjid was demolished on 6 December 1992, rioting started in Bombay that evening, and the violence escalated to claim nearly 1000 lives in the next two months, and injured many more. The bloodletting was capped by the first terror attack on Bombay. The perpetrators of the twelve bombings that dayDawood Ibrahim and his henchman, Tiger Memon, along with his family, among otherswere all in Pakistan, something that Memons brother, Yakub, confirmed when he returned to India in 1994. Yakub and 100 others were convicted, and he was among the eleven sentenced to death for financing the operation, for instance, by providing tickets to the men to be sent for arms training in Pakistan. The charge sheet filed in November 1993 in the case mentioned that some of the accused had gone to Pakistan for training.