SA Travel Diaries: Ferozepur Part II-The Hussainiwala Border

Shan-e-Hind, the Indian End of Hussainiwala Border

I think it is pretty unfair that all we ever associate Indo-Pak borders with, is the flag ceremonies:hoisting and beating the retreat. Hussainiwala is not exception!  And so, after a sad, halfhearted goodbye to the Jain Temples of Zira, we made our way to Hussainiwala, for a doze of British Indian history and its forgotten sites.

I was too tired to take anymore pictures though the way to the Border is lined with meadows, forests and even lotus in the small ponds.
I heard Dad explain to us the double-ditch defence strategy and that was the only remotely interesting to spark an interest in my tired, aching brain. 

We reached Hussainiwala an hour too early for the parade and spent the time taking pictures of Shan-e-Hind gate. I never warmed up to the idea of the flag ceremonies.  They are just the same and seem to say something entirely different from what they actually mean.  So, even on that day, the parade was no different than the usual sham it is, though there were a bunch of silly school girls, who started shouting slogans out.  Team Pakistan was not to be left behind and Mum and I wondered aloud on the futility of it all because the BSF guards and the Pakistani Rangers stood right there talking, laughing and chatting with each other,  more friends than enemies. What was the retreat then, but an eyewash? A fake, staged drama to arouse public sentiment and to infuse a sense of hatred in them that didn't exist between their armies, not on this border at least!

The Ranger and the Guard

Or was it just a satire? Here were Rangers and Guards showing the soles of their shoes to each other's face, threatening with gestures, guns and what not, like a staged up dance of some sort, and yet the flag of Pakistan retreated on the Indian soil and the flag of India on their side! 

Maybe they are not arousing public sentiment.  Maybe, they are trying to show you in a subtle way that, technically,  there is no war, there is no separate India and Pakistan in the hearts of the people. In hearts, as in the race and colour, and language and cuisine and culture, we are one. What divides us is a fake, staged play of politics, that forces even the army to display fake animosity and kill each other at war. They don't want to. The sun sets down together on the two countries.  The flags, when they come down, stay joined for 5 seconds, as if embracing each other, mourning the line drawn in their midst. And yet,  empty ambitions of two Cambridge educated men, and not love or patriotism, has brought us to this!

The HSRA Revolutionaries Memorial

My interest lay in what we were going to visit next: the Bhagat Singh Memorial. It was here that he and his fellow conspirators were cremated stealthily at night. Bhagat Singh, Raj Guru, Sukhdev(or the Rang de Basanti Team, as I like to think of them) bring forth so many questions to an analytical mind.  Terrorists for the British Indian Government,  heros for us---history is written by the victors,  the hunters and not the hunted, and one's hero is truly the other's villain.

The Qaiser-i-Hind Tower

As I laid flowers on their memorials, I couldn't stop myself from thinking over and over again about events that led to March 23, 1931 until, I was pointed to a tower called Qaiser-i-Hind,  yet another painful reminder of the  tactlessly drawn Radcliffe line and the heartless partition of India and Pakistan because once upon a time, a double terminus, for bus and train went from here to Lahore. All that stands there now is a severed railway track.

The severed Railway line that
once went upto Lahore

I have never enjoyed Modern Indian History, because the sores and scars it left on the face of India, bleed and fester still. We talk about people suffering but no matter who suffers, who is shot and who dies, we are simply dying our hands with fratricide. Speaking archaeologically (figure of speech, not the our organisation!), much of the shared history and archaeology of these two countries which once were one,  suffer from neglect, vandalism and lie forgotten because of the Partition. 

Ferozepur is one of the many such places that hides accounts of forgotten history in its bosom and as I drove back from Hussainiwala,  I knew that I wasn't done hunting them down.  Not yet.