Travelling to India

Frankly, it’s unbelievable (especially to those who don’t live in either country) that Pakistan and India – countries with a collective population of approximately 1.7 billion and with tens of millions on either side with roots in the other country – have no transport links with each other.

Of course, this is not to say that they have had none in the past, but the last transport link – the Samjhota Express train that links Lahore with Delhi, through Wagah and Attari – was stopped in 2019 as was the Thar Express which linked Karachi with the city of Jodhpur in the Indian state of Rajasthan (the 700 km journey would take around 13 hours).

Besides the train links, the countries had three bus services, all now suspended, from Lahore to Delhi (which would take eight hours to cover 400 km), from Muzaffarabad to Srinagar (170 km) and from Rawalakot to Poonch (32 km).

As for air links, Air India stopped flying to Pakistan a long time ago – as far back as 2008 – though PIA kept flying to Delhi and Mumbai with as many as five flights a week. However, PIA also cut back its flights in 2016, eventually stopping them. The reasons cited by both airlines were that there was not enough passenger demand – which wasn’t exactly accurate. The actual reason was that both countries had more or less stopped giving visas to nationals of other countries, so obviously the stream of passengers dried up.

The arrival of several Indian journalists through the Wagah border crossing a couple of days ago to cover the proceedings of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Islamabad where Indian Foreign Minister S Jaishankar was in attendance. Since this is the first visit by an Indian foreign minister to Pakistan in over a decade, it’s big news and hence the interest in media coverage.

And so, the arrival of the Indian journalists reminded me of my many visits to India as a journalist – often to attend conferences and twice to attend Track II meetings. The last one was in 2013. Since the BJP government took power with its overt hostility towards Pakistan and India’s own Muslim population, there didn’t seem much of an incentive to visit India anymore.

Of course, this is not to say that the visits were not memorable and full of experiences that you would remember for a long time – yes they were, from getting free cab rides because you were from Pakistan to Indian journalists going out of their way to show you around Delhi, to being invited to dinner at the home of a well-known Indian journalist and meeting several others, to sitting and talking to politicians and retired ambassadors and Indian generals, all of whom advocated that both countries needed to co-exist peacefully since there was no other choice.

However, the fact remains that at present if you want to visit India to meet your relatives (there are millions of Pakistanis in that category and the same on the other side of the border) or if you want to attend a conference or meet fellow journalists in India, then you have the almost-impossible task of first applying and obtaining a visa. And if you want to visit India as a tourist then forget it – neither country followed up on its promised intention of starting tourist visas.

And if you do manage to obtain a visa, then there are no direct flights between the two countries – you have to fly via Dubai, Abu Dhabi, or Colombo and that takes a lot more time and costs much more than a train or a bus. This option is especially difficult for those who are part of divided families and want to visit India to visit their relatives.

So it is only at high-profile events, like the SCO Summit for instance, and where their country’s foreign minister will be in attendance, that journalists from India get the chance to visit Pakistan. In fact, at the risk of sounding biased, Pakistan is more agreeable to giving visas to Indian visitors (such as journalists or pilgrims) than India is in the case of visitors from Pakistan.

Both countries give visas that are specific only to certain cities. I had to attend a multilateral conference in New Delhi which was shifted to a hotel in Gurgaon, which is right next to the capital and more or less a suburb – and the Indian High Commission in Islamabad asked for my passport back so that it could be stamped with an additional endorsement for Gurgaon.

The same goes for Indian visitors – which means that if the visa is only for Islamabad, they can’t technically visit Rawalpindi or Murree. Every time I visited Delhi, I couldn’t go to Agra to see the Taj Mahal because the visa was only for the city.

That’s unfortunately just how it is now and citizens of both countries have come to accept it. Of course, in India there is a significant chunk of the population that has no desire whatsoever to even look in Pakistan’s direction, let alone visit it, and this is largely thanks to the poison put out in Indian media and textbooks, all under the patronage of the BJP which treats even Indian Muslims as Pakistanis – and hence traitors.

Both governments need to realise that hundreds of millions of people on both sides of the border do not want a permanent state of hostility and wouldn’t mind at all visiting the other country. Pakistani music and dramas are massive in India, thanks to streaming services and social media, and Bollywood has had millions of fans in Pakistan for decades.

The question is: when will the politicians and establishments on both sides align their policies with the larger public opinion to increase people-to-people contact?

The writer is a journalist based in Karachi. He tweets/posts @omar_quraishi and can be reached at: omarrquraishi@gmail.com