Point Zero

It’s a forty-minute drive from Lahore east to Wagah. Lahore is a site of ancient learning, and Moghul palaces and the Anarkali Bazaar, atomb of the poet just about the same thing going west from Amritsar, home of the Golden Temple of the Sikhs. It is along the Grand Trunk Road that leads to old Delhi , the one down which General Nicholson and his wild mounted column rode pell-mell to the relief of Delhi .

The two cities are not in the same country anymore. That is a sore point with the curator of the Lahore Fort, from which the Moghul gold was stripped to gild the temple of the Sikhs.

That certainly is not the only sore point. At the end of British India , at least ten million souls were uprooted by a new border, and perhaps twice that many. One of them is a Punjabi who runs the American Oil Change franchise down the street from me. He is a Muslim, and his family had the misfortune to live on what was about to become the Hindu-majority side.

The British were finished in India , though the ghosts would linger. They did not know it completely yet, thinking perhaps wistfully that the Viceroy would transition from the absolute ruler into some avuncular senior counselor, perhaps even continuing to live in the lavish Viceregal Lodge that Herbert Baker designed with Edwin Lutyens, and which was built by the imperturbable Public Works Department between 1911 and 1931.

Of course, today the Lodge is known as the Rashtrapati Bhavan, or presidential palace.

Delhi was the Imperial capital only from the time of the great Delhi Durbar in 1911 until midnight on August 15th, 1947. There was turmoil all across the Empire: problems in Malaysia and Borneo, incipient unpleasantness in Kenya .

There was scarcity at home, and in America , the new medium of television was first used to communicate national policy. The first televised White House address contained a request to the American people to refrain from eating meat on Tuesdays and poultry on Thursdays to help stockpile grain for starving people in Europe .

The great Churchill had been sent back to Chartwell and to leadership of the Opposition.

“Sir,” he famously grumbled, “I was not elected Prime Minister to preside upon the dissolution of the British Empire .”

But dissolution it was to be, and the start of the lowering of the imperial flag all around the world. Labour was in power, and Clement Attlee decreed that India would be free, not later than June of 1948. He dispatched Lord Louis Mountbatten, the former Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia to be the last Viceroy. His task was to figure out a plan for the orderly transfer of power, and to keep the subcontinent united, if possible.

It appeared that it was not. Jinnah of the Muslim League and Nehru of the Congress Party had agreed on that, and then disagreed. The communities were to be divided; Punjab and Bengal would be sundered form the Motherland. Mountbatten arrived in March of 1947, and by June the plan to turn over the sub-continent to its residents was announced. Three weeks later a Boundary Commission to separate the Muslim-majority areas from the Hindu-majority ones was created.

A bespeckled lawyer by the name of Cyril Radcliffe was sent out from London and entrusted with the drawing of the line of partition, which came to bear his name.

He had never been to India before, his closest connection having had a brother killed there while on active service. The presumption was that his lack of familiarity would lead to impartiality.

The consequences of the line were breathtaking for millions. There were problems with the division in Punjab and Bengal , and political considerations had to be accommodated. In Punjab , the land of five fivers, the problem was the Gurdaspur District.

Gurdaspur had a Muslim majority, and in his initial proposal, Radcliffe recommended the Viceroy convey it to Pakistan . The Viceroy decreed that it would not be so. Mountbatten was concerned that the adjoining states Jammu and Kashmir would be cut off from the prospective Indian Union by a Pakistani Gurdaspur. Placing it in Indian hands would provide a buffer to Amritsar , the holy city of the Skihs, and to the Golden Temple , which otherwise would be surrounded by a Muslim state.

And so Radcliffe drew his thick line through Wagah, and that is the only place in the 1,250 miles of border where one may cross legally between the two new countries. He left India and returned to England as rapidly as possible when his job was done. He was made a Viscount for his service to the Queen, and still remembered by those whose lives were sundered. But his line at Wagah is now known as the Zero Point.

The gate at the Zero Point is not a real crossing. Wagah is akin to the Spy Bridge at Glienicke over the Havel River in Berlin , or the rail bridge across the Imjin River between the Koreas . The gates may be opened, but it is by the mutual agreement of the aggrieved parties.

There have been three wars between the nations of the sub-continent, in 1948, 1965 and 1971. There is a continuing one which continues seasonal along the Line of Control in Kashmir, and high in the glacier-fields of the Himalayas . Wagah is a microcosm of the larger conflict.

In the year of independence, Major General K. S. Bajwa was a young lieutenant in the Indian Army in 1947. In his memoirs he describes his arrival with the 1 Dogra Brigade to Point Zero. He said the Pakistanis on the other side of the line were “brusque and aggressive.” Tents were erected on either side of the border, and the flags of the new nations flew from improvised poles stuck in oil drums.

The Brigade commander had grown up in a military institution that understood pageantry. He was dismayed that the symbol of his nation’s struggle for independence looked so forlorn. And so began the ceremonial escalation at Wagah. That night, after beating retreat, Lt Col Signh commanded five Dodge trucks to be brought to the Indian side of the border, and their lights shined as his sappers erected a pedestal for the flagpole.

The Pakistanis watched curiously at the activity, wary. In the morning, the Indian banner flew proudly over the crossing. The next night the Pakistani Military Engineering Service arrived and constructed an even more elaborate pedestal. And the next morning the strutting began.

Both sides vied to add visible flourishes of superiority in the years that followed; taller troopers, more feathers on headgear, higher goose-steps, higher by far than the Russians at the Tomb of the Unknown in Red Square . In fact, those that have been there say the strutting is quite remarkable.

It is a place of great national pride for these twins, separated at birth, and requires no nuclear weapons, though if one were counting, the Pakistanis would point out that they have tested one more device than the Indians. Grandstands were added at Wagah by the Indians in 2000 to accommodate the crowds; the Pakistanis responded with their own the next year. On some evenings the crowds number more than 10,000.

The soldiers are smartly dressed: khaki uniforms for the Indians, ornate red, yellow and black cummerbunds and matching collars, turbaned and feathered headgear, and badges of the Border Security Force. Their marching boots are covered with gleaming puttees.

The Pakistani Rangers are equally crisp, turned out in green salwar kurtas , with similar ornate cummerbunds and collars, and turbaned and tasseled headgear.

The Indian and Pakistani gate-tenders each open their side, and stand on no-man’s land and greet each other with a handshake.

The flags are lowered at exactly the same rate of speed, with graceful deliberation. Then they are folded and carried away from the gates. Then the gates are slammed shut again, closed until the flag-raising in the morning.

It’s impressive, I’m told, and I would like to see it in person someday, if I get back to India. I am still a little bitter about not going to Checkpoint Charlie when I had a chance, and there were real Communists in Berlin.

The gates at Wagah have actually been used of late. Thousands of prisoners were exchanged last year, a first, and a single bus ventures from Delhi to Lahore four times a week as a confidence-building measure. They open the gates for the bus.

It is a big deal.

Copyright 2005 Vic Sococtra

www.vicsocotra.com

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