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All our modern euphemisms – "killing fields," "ethnic cleansing" – could have derived from the hysterical blood-spilling that irrigated this flat landscape in 1947 immediately following independence. Whole trainloads of refugees, and whole columns of those fleeing on foot, were massacred if caught in the "wrong" zone. Many people still blame Lord Mountbatten, the last British viceroy, for his abdication, for not acting to put down the Hindu and Muslim fanatics. And if you hear survivors argue it's as if they were talking about yesterday. Nobody has ever come up with a precise tally for the fallen, and I would predict that nobody ever will, but a million or so in a very few weeks is probably the least of it. On either side of this frontier, there is still one of the most toxic and unstable concentrations of latent violence in the world. Every civilian airport that I visited from Amritsar to Chandigarh was humped with bunkers for billion-dollar warplanes. Every side road had a signpost warning of the unwisdom of photography and the presence of military installations. The fact that both the Indian and Pakistani armies wear British-style uniforms and cap badges, and speak of "the officers' mess," is considered reassuring by some, because surely in these mustachioed and cavalry-oriented forces there must lie some hope of humor and restraint. Not if you bear in mind that both armies have tested nuclear weapons, have come exceedingly close to employing them, are divided by caste and religion, and have fought two conventional wars and are still rehearsing for the next one, in nearby Kashmir. (it) |
