Once again, with Manmohan Singh and Pervez Musharraf meeting in Havana, we are likely to get back to the slow business that defines the peace process between India and Pakistan. Amidst the rhetoric about people-to-people contact, talk will yet again veer back to initiatives that can bring the two Punjabs closer.
But so far, what is remarkable about the process is the extent to which symbolic gestures that reach across the Atari-Wagah border have substituted for any real achievement. In between the only two definable achievements – the Delhi-Lahore bus in 1999 and the Amritsar-Nankana Sahib bus in March 2006, as far as 'Punjab' is concerned – the peace process replicates the cooperative belligerence of the 'beating retreat' ceremony at Wagah (See accompanying story, "Their vengeance"). Over the years, jawans on the two sides of the border have learned to march in step for the ceremony, mirroring every gesture of aggression the other summons, much in the fashion of the expulsion and counter-expulsion of diplomats that takes place here after every round of violence in India or Pakistan.
Spectators on either side of the Wagah border exhort their jawans throughout the ceremony, but once the charade is done for the day they wander as close to the border as they can, to peer at their counterpart citizens. There is little to separate the two – the faces, features and languages are the same, perhaps a few more sherwanis on one side and a few more turbans on the other. And on this similarity, nostalgia has created an edifice of 'people-to-people' contact that really amounts to very little.
The fact is, much of the cultural contact has been based on myths that some people on either side of the border are content to sustain. Even if we leave aside the traffic generated – both across the border and in the media – by the select few journalists and artists who seem to form a part of every official and unofficial peace delegation, there is much that we get to hear about cultural commonality and shared heritage that does not stand up to scrutiny.