Bollywood, saris and a bombed
train By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE - While the larger aim of the
terror attack on the Delhi-Lahore Samjhauta
Express last Sunday night might have been to
undermine the ongoing India-Pakistan peace
process, it was to snap the mass people-to-people
contact that the train enabled that could have
been the more immediate goal.
Pakistan-based jihadis, who Indian
security officials say are the most likely to have
carried out the attack in which nearly 70 people
died, are said to be alarmed by the "corrupting
influence" of Indian popular culture on Pakistani
people. By targeting the
Samjhauta Express, those who
masterminded the attack sent out a chilling
message that they are determined to sever the
growing links between the people of the two
countries.
The Samjhauta Express, which
connects Delhi with the Pakistani city of Lahore,
was launched 30 years ago. Also called the
"Friendship Train", it is often regarded as the
barometer of the India-Pakistan relationship. It
has been suspended twice - in the mid-1980s at the
height of the Sikh separatist movement in the
Indian border state of Punjab and in 2002, when
India and Pakistan were on the brink of war after
an attack by Pakistan-backed terrorists on India's
parliament building.
In 2004, when India
and Pakistan normalized relations, the Samjhauta
Express was put back into service and it has been
on track since, ferrying hundreds of thousands of
people between the two countries.
What
bother jihadis and religious fundamentalists about
initiatives such as the cross-border train is that
Indians and Pakistanis are meeting, exchanging
views and getting to see and experience how people
on the other side of the border live. Ordinary
Pakistanis, long taught to believe that Muslims in
India are not allowed to observe their religion,
are surprised by the large number of mosques in
India and the freedom that Muslims have to pray
and celebrate their festivals.
Indian
Muslims are going to Pakistan and finding that the
streets of Karachi and Lahore are not paved with
gold and that those who migrated to Pakistan in
1947 (the mohajirs) are second-class
citizens there. They are realizing that their
future is far brighter in India's booming economy
than it would have been in Pakistan. People from
Jammu and Kashmir who have gone across to
Pakistan-controlled Kashmir have come back with
tales about "the medieval lifestyles" of their kin
across the Line of Control that separates it from
Indian-administered Kashmir.
If over the
past decade the India-Pakistan seminar circuit
found that issues of common concern should bring
their two countries together, today it is the
masses traveling in the Samjhauta Express that are
rediscovering a shared culture. And if in the past
Pakistanis had to make do with videocassettes of
popular Bollywood movies smuggled into Pakistan -
there is a ban on Bollywood movies in Pakistan -
today, they can see these movies when they come to
India and take back compact discs for their
families.
For jihadis, the various
people-to-people initiatives - and especially the
Samjhauta Express - are plots by "Hindu India" to
wipe out Muslim culture and beliefs. "In their
imagination," writes noted journalist Praveen
Swami in The Hindu, the Samjhauta Express "is a
Trojan horse, a vehicle for the destruction of the
project of Pakistan."
Swami cites a recent
issue of Ghazva, the Pakistan-based terror
organization Lashkar-e-Toiba's in-house
publication, to draw attention to growing jihadist
concern regarding the impact of the peace process.
"Up until now," the report in Ghazva says, "only
India has enjoyed the benefits of the Islamabad
Declaration. All Pakistan got from that agreement
is an exchange of cultural troupes. And as if that
wasn't enough, Indian politicians have taken the
exchange of such cultural troupes a step forward
by suggesting eradication of borders between India
and Pakistan.
"On the other hand," Ghazva
says, "our own rulers are trying to weaken our
ideological borders, instead of strengthening
them. Efforts are under way by the Pakistani
government to remove facts and material from the
curriculum which educates our youth about the
designs of the Hindus, and exposes their real
mindset about Muslims in general and Pakistan in
particular."
And conservatives in Pakistan
have a new problem to worry about. The sari,
reviled by conservatives as "Indian and
un-Islamic", is staging a comeback as high-fashion
attire among Pakistani women three decades after
it went out of vogue thanks to military dictator
General Zia ul-Haq's attempts to Islamize the
country.
Although the sari is worn by
women in several South Asian countries, it is
widely seen in Pakistan as Indian or Hindu attire.
Many in Pakistan frown on women wearing saris as
it is regarded to be far too revealing - the
choli or blouse is cut short leaving the
midriff bare - and figure-flattering. This
together with successive Pakistani governments
wanting to distance themselves from South Asia to
feel a part of Muslim West Asia resulted in women
opting for the salwar kameez over the sari.
While the sari is nowhere near unseating
the salwar kameez as the most popular
attire in Pakistan just yet, the very fact that it
is making a comeback, even if only among the elite
and for wear on formal occasions, is sure to draw
the ire of the conservatives.
The growing
popularity of the sari among Pakistan's
fashion-conscious elite is being blamed on another
bete noire of conservatives - Bollywood
movies and television serials. "The Indian
electronic media [have] played an important role
in promoting the sari culture in Pakistan. Now
Pakistani actresses on TV channels are being seen
wearing saris, especially young women," reports
The Nation, an English-language newspaper
published from Lahore.
For decades,
Pakistan's rulers and conservatives sought to keep
out Indian popular culture; Bollywood and Indian
television channels were banned. This was of
course partly prompted by the need to protect
Pakistan's entertainment industry from being wiped
out by its more seductive and popular Indian
counterpart. But also, it was part of the larger
project of demonizing the enemy, as Bollywood's
hugely popular movies would have severely
subverted the government's anti-India propaganda.
The India-Pakistan smuggling network did of course
bring Bollywood to Pakistan anyway.
While
the official ban on Bollywood remains in force,
what is happening now, thanks to the closer
people-to-people interaction, is subverting the
jihadist project on a far greater scale.
Pakistani passengers on the Samjhauta
Express are carrying home from India not only
saris, bangles, CDs, beedis (cigarettes
made of tobacco and wrapped in the tendu leaf),
paan masala (betel leaves wrapped around
spice and sometimes tobacco) and pressure cookers
but also tales of life in India.
Of
course, India too has been reluctant to open its
doors to Pakistanis. Its response to initiatives
that envisaged greater people-to-people contact
was rather paranoid in the past. This was prompted
in part by security concerns, but also this
reluctance had to do with anxieties over how its
poverty and problems would be perceived abroad.
The economic upturn and the improvement of the
security situation in Kashmir have made India more
confident today about opening its doors to
Pakistanis.
In previous years, it was only
the well-to-do Pakistani who could afford flights
to India that got to experience the seductive
appeal of India's noisy democracy and its popular
culture. The Samjhauta Express has changed that.
Thousands of poor Pakistanis are now able to pour
into India and sample it as well. It has made them
hate their giant neighbor less.
That has
worried the jihadis. And that is why the train
became their target last week. But at least the
train is still running - it resumed services on
Wednesday.
Sudha Ramachandran is
an independent journalist/researcher based in
Bangalore.
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