For many Indians, Pakistan does not exist. After decades of bemoaning Partition, forgetting Pakistan has become the preferred option. Border incidents may make news, but happenings inside Pakistan are like events on another planet. Maps of undivided India may be found on Google or in libraries, but they no longer exist on Indian minds.
Only a few of the millions who crossed over from Pakistan to India 75 years ago are now alive. Their descendants have developed interests that do not seem to include Pakistan, and the same seems true for the rest of the population. Today Lahore and Karachi are as foreign as Lisbon and Caracas.
I am curious, however, about the speculation that after a long disruption in relations India might attend, if only virtually, a likely SAARC summit – a gathering of leaders of South Asian nations – that Pakistan is scheduled to host this year. There is even an unconfirmed hint of a resumption of Indo-Pak trade, which received a lethal hit in August 2019, when India terminated Kashmir’s special status.
More interesting, possibly, is the statement made on January 12 by India’s army chief, General M.M. Naravane, that India “is not averse” to the demilitarization of the Siachen Glacier, if Pakistan accepts the “Actual Ground Position Line” separating the armies of India and Pakistan along the high-altitude front. Naravane added that the thaw evidently being sought by the Chinese and Indian armies on the heights of eastern Ladakh could be emulated in Siachen, which is not far from the site of the Sino-Indian confrontation.
Year after year, Siachen’s relentless death-toll of Indian and Pakistani soldiers killed not by bullets but by the icy cold has been accompanied, on both sides of the India-Pakistan border, by a declining interest in life on the other side.
I do not know whether the stories I am passing on about SAARC, trade and Siachen are real and significant. Are trial balloons being floated? We may soon find out.
Returning to where I began, it should be granted that at least some Pakistanis seem interested in our joint history. The contents of Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English-language newspaper, indicate this.
I take the liberty below of quoting sentences from a Dawn article written by an Indian-American doctor, Alok Khorana, professor of medicine at Ohio’s renowned Cleveland Clinic. Originally from Vadodara, Dr Khorana is a great-nephew of Dr Har Gobind Khorana, winner in 1968 of the Nobel Prize in medicine. This is what he writes:
“A century ago on January 9, 1922, in the dusty village of Raipur, in Multan District — a village so small only about a hundred people could lay claim to residing there — my great-grandmother gave birth to her youngest son, whom they called Har Gobind.
“Family lore speaks of a mischievous child who liked to steal sugarcane from the sugarcane fields… In 1945, Gobind was fortunate to be sent to England on a studentship to study insecticides and fungicides… This latest stroke of luck not only set him on the path of cutting-edge science at the time, it also saved him from the “junoon” (the madness) that possessed both halves of Punjab in August of 1947.
“The family had to leave Multan, their home for centuries — as it had been for other Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. Thanks in part to help from Muslim friends, the family all made it alive crossing over as refugees in Delhi later in 1947.
“In the early 1950s, science was on the cusp of understanding for the first time the exact mechanisms that translate genes into proteins — the code of life. At his first independent job in Vancouver, Gobind began to work on understanding this process.
“In 1960, moving to Madison, Wisconsin, Gobind and his colleagues worked hard to solve the problem of the genetic code — how the “language” of DNA and RNA is transformed into proteins in the cell. Two years after the Nobel, Gobind and his team reported the first chemical synthesis of a gene, coding for a transfer RNA….
“Today, a century after his birth, we honor the scientific legacy of this pioneer of molecular biology, whom many call the “father of chemical biology”, a legacy that has transformed our understanding of genes, genetics and the genome and impacted the clinical course of many illnesses, from cancer to Covid.
“The village of Raipur still exists,…[as] part of [Pakistan’s] Punjab province. If I hover over the area on Google Maps, as I do on occasion when my heart draws me to our ancestral land, I can see the outlines of green fields and of homes with courtyards that remind me of the family home he described in conversation… I think it is safe to assume that there are still sugarcane fields, and children still stealing from them.
“The legacies and triumphs of Dr H G Khorana are… the shared legacies and triumphs of the people of the subcontinent.”
The whole article can be found at https://www.dawn.com/news/1668120. Those reading it might glimpse brave shoots of humanity even in what often seems a Indo-Pak desert where hot winds of ill-will blow across sands of indifference.