Bridging the Thar: Resuming the Sindh-Rajasthan Railway Link
Yoginder Sikand
Rail links between India and Pakistan in the Sindh-Rajasthan sector are due to be resumed early next month. The railway line between Munnabao in Rajasthan with Khokhrapar in Sindh was laid down by the British in the late nineteenth century, linking Jodhpur with Mirpur Khas across the Thar desert. Following the Partition of India in 1947, this line was disrupted and all traffic across this stretch of the border was stopped. For the last several years demands have been made for the resumption of the link but these have been stalemated by bureaucratic inertia and official indifference, being hostage to strained relations between India and Pakistan. The flagging off of the first train on the Khokhrapar-Munnabao line in almost six decades on the first of February this year will thus mark a major step forward in the normalization of relations between the two countries.
Last week I was in Sindh, and the resumption of the Rajasthan-Sindh rail link was a major issue in the local press and in conversations I had with numerous people. Most Muhajirs, migrants from different parts of India and now mainly living in urban centres in Sindh, are enthusiastic about the development. ‘It is a great blessing for the large numbers of Muhajirs who still have relatives in India and who have to travel literally thousands of miles to Islamabad and then to Lahore and Wagah to get to Amritsar and from there to different parts of India to meet their families. Not only does the journey take several days, it is also prohibitively expensive for ordinary people, who have to face the added expense of staying in Islamabad for several days waiting for an Indian visa’, says Hussain Abdi, a shop-keeper in Larkana, half of whose family lives barely a hundred miles across the border in Rajasthan’s Barmer district.
‘The rail link between Sindh and Rajasthan should have been opened years ago’, says Arif, a student from Hyderabad, Sindh’s second largest town and home to a large Muhajir community. ‘In fact’, he says, ‘this rail link is far more important than the existing one between Attari and Wagah in Punjab, because most people in Pakistan with relatives in India live in Sindh, and the number of such people in Punjab is few’. He claims that arguments put forward by opponents of the Sindh-Rajasthan rail link are specious. ‘Some people who oppose it say that it will promote cross-border smuggling, but this is ridiculous. Most smuggling takes place in the Punjab sector, and most sensitive military and other such locations in Pakistan are in Punjab and yet the train link between the two Punjabs has been open for years and now there are even bus links, so why have the Indian and Pakistani governments been dragging their feet on the Sindh-Rajasthan train link all these years?’.
For Pakistan’s almost two million Hindu minority, most of whom live in Sindh, the announcement of the rail link has been greeted with enthusiasm. Like the Muhajirs, many Hindu families in Sindh have relatives across the border in India. ‘I have not seen my family in Rajasthan since 1947 because I cannot afford the cost of traveling all the way to Lahore to get to India’, says Shiv Kumar, an elderly Hindu shopkeeper from Hyderabad, who hopes to be able to travel to India this year. ‘For the Hindus of Sindh, the train link will also help promote cultural and religious contacts, and will enable us to travel to Hindu pilgrimage centres in India, which we have only heard of but have never seen’, says Rama, a Bhil who works as a daily wage agricultural labourer in a village near Moenjodaro.
Opposition to the rail link is being voiced by some fringe Sindhi nationalist quarters. ‘The link might lead to a mass migration of Indian Muslims to Sindh, which will reduce the Sindhis to a minority in their own land. As it is, because of the large number of Muhajirs, Punjabis and Pathans now settled in Sindh, ethnic Sindhis now form only 60% of the population of the province’, says Hamid, an Sindhi student from Bhit Sharif. This fear was voiced by some other Sindhis whom I met. I tried hard to convince them that their fear was largely baseless. The economic and political conditions in Pakistan, especially in Sindh, are so dismal, I explained, that few Indian Muslims would probably want to shift there. And to add to this are lingering memories of strained relations between ethnic Sindhis and Muhajirs and the bloody ethnic riots engineered by rival political forces that resulted in the deaths of thousands in urban Sindh. In any case, I tell them, if the Attari-Wagah rail link has not resulted in a flood of Indian Muslim migrants to Pakistan, it is unlikely that the Khokrapar-Munnabo rail will do so.
Some Sindhi nationalists also fear that the train link would lead to an exodus of Sindhi Hindus to India, resulting in a further decline of the ethnic Sindhi population. Most Sindhi Hindus are Dalits daily wage labourers, living in abject poverty. Life for the few remaining ‘upper’ caste Sindhi Hindus is also not easy. The day I reached Larkana, a major town in interior Sindh, newspapers reported the murder of a local Hindu businessman by dacoits. Such stories are not rare. ‘It is possible that the train service between Sindh and Rajasthan might help some Hindus in Sindh to shift to India for economic or security reasons’, admits Ram Deo, a Dalit Meghwal who runs a roadside eatery in a small town outside Hyderabad. However, he adds, ‘It is unlikely that it would lead to a mass migration because, after all, one can cross over to India only if one has valid documents’.
Another aspect of the opposition to the train are the implications that it might have for domestic Sindhi politics. Naseem Shaikh, an ethnic Sindhi and a staunch leftist, argues, ‘Some people opposed to the train fear that cultural influences promoted by closer contact with India might undermine the power of the feudal lords, who exercise such an enormous influence and continue to hold most Sindhis under their sway’. Shaikh sees the train as a good omen, because, he says, ‘It might help bring in new currents of thought from across the border and might also promote badly-needed economic development in Sindh’, although in the same breath he insists that what he is desirable is ‘progressive cultural influence, not Bollywood-style consumerism’. And if that happens, he says, the train can play a major role in promoting people-to-people contact between Indians and Pakistanis and help reduce tensions between the two countries.
Also see: www.islaminterfaith.org
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