PUNJAB LETTER:MY REMOTE village of Dera Baba Nanak (DBN) on the Pakistani border is fearful once again that rising tension with India's nuclear rival, following last November's terrorist strikes in Mumbai, could augur ill for its 8,000-odd residents.
For several weeks after Mumbai’s siege by 10 gunmen in which 164 people were killed, villagers anticipated the familiar roar of tanks and the rattle of field guns as they camouflaged themselves in scattered mango groves, their barrels aimed across the Ravi river that meanders between the two countries that have fought three wars and a border skirmish since independence 62 years ago.
Exactly seven years ago, following the terrorist attack on India’s parliament in December 2001 which too was blamed on Pakistan, they feared the worst as soldiers deployed in DBN, 400km (249 miles) north of New Delhi in Punjab state and along the rest of the 3,147km frontier for 10 months in anticipation of war.
But mercifully for DBN the army’s movement to the village has been limited this time round, even though the Indian government, blaming a non-compliant Pakistan for launching the terrorists, has still not entirely ruled out a military option to settle matters.
Militarily, DBN is the gateway to the key Pakistani city of Sialkot, just 25km distant as the crow flies, and my parents recall that just for one day at the time of independence in August 1947, it ended up inside newly created Pakistan as confusion prevailed over boundary lines.
Dera, meaning encampment, is named after my ancestor, the visionary peasant Nanak Bedi who founded Sikhism in the 15th century. A distant relative is the custodian of Nanak’s white homespun cloak and wooden slippers that are displayed each year at a special fair in the village in March attended by tens of thousands of devotees.
Before independence, better known locally as partition, even Muslims flocked to visit the holy man’s effects as he was revered by all communities, but all that has long ended.
Conflict and war, however, are not new to Dera’s residents, the majority of them farmers. Many remember the 1965 and 1971 wars with Pakistan when all the women and children were dispatched to nearby towns for safety and the menfolk stayed behind to tend to their fields and look after the jawans (soldiers), lavishing Punjabi hospitality on them.
Artillery and tank duels raged around Dera for control of the vital bridge over the Ravi, badly damaged in 1965 and never repaired since.
The artillery fire in 1971 was equally fierce as some of the field guns secreted in our small family mango grove relentlessly bombarded the enemy.
But we all remain convinced that Nanak, who spent the last 17 years of his life until 1539 farming a small plot of land in Dera, some of it divided between his descendants, hovers protectively above, ensuring that no harm comes to his beloved village.
“Guru Nanak’s blessing will ensure that nothing happens to us,” Raghbir Singh Bedi, a retired school headmaster and cousin confidentially said. His (Nanak’s) blessings made sure that no harm came to us in the last two wars.
He will do the same for us again if there is a fight, he added.
But the possibility of military hostility for many residents remains a reality even as the cacophonic drone of loudspeakers, relaying Sikh prayers, barely manages to edge out the previous night’s continuing din of popular Punjabi songs being played by the local eunuchs to celebrate the birth of a child in Jewellers Alley.
This is the area where my grandfather, a sessions judge in what is now Pakistan, once came across a pot full of gold coins and jewellery whilst digging the foundations of our family house, now a complete ruin over a century later. He was allowed by the government to keep one gold sovereign from the entire cache.
Over the years we heard fascinatingly romantic stories of many others similarly finding treasure buried in walls that crumbled during the monsoon rains, a phenomenon the village elders attributed to divine intervention and association with Nanak.
Decades later, however, a more prosaic and plausible explanation emerged: the booty was what refugees fleeing their homes in Pakistan in 1947 buried on brief stopovers at the frontier village, hoping to collect it later, but never returning.
A few hundred metres from Dera’s narrow bazaar, dominated by the ancient golden-domed Gurdwara or Sikh temple, is the newly constructed viewing gallery looking into Pakistan, built last year by India’s paramilitary Border Security Force that mans the country’s frontiers.
From on top of this tower lush green fields of ripening wheat dominate both sides of the border, belying the heightened tension between the two sides.
Ordinarily, this bucolic landscape would be idyllic. But, sadly it hides within it an inherent nastiness and enmity, capable of erupting into discord any time.
