When airwaves knew no boundaries

Harvinder Khetal

There is fresh excitement over the renewed possibility of a Sikh pilgrim corridor to Pakistan ever since Navjot Singh Sidhu claimed that the Pakistan army chief, Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, had told him of Pakistan’s intention to connect Gurdwara Darbar Sahib at Kartarpur in Pakistan with Dera Baba Nanak in Gurdaspur district. He was also given a dateline: it would open on the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak, which is next year. 

That would be historic. 2019 may well be the year when visa-free flow of people, limited to start with, between the two Punjabs would begin — for the first time since the 1965 war. The notion felt akin to that other historic event of November 8, 1989: the fall of the Berlin wall. It had led to the citizens of the same ethnic stock from East and West Germany freely crossing the boundaries following the thawing of the Cold War. 

From this hopeful picture of a rosy future, I recalled the summer of 2016 when I had gone on a pilgrimage to Pakistan with a Sikh jatha visiting various shrines symbolising landmarks of the Sikh Gurus. Under a tight security umbrella, we paid obeisance at Gurdwara Janam Asthan (the place where Guru Nanak was born in 1469) in Nankana Sahib. Gurdwara Panja Sahib in Hasan Abdal and Gurdwara Sacha Sauda in Farooqabad were the other important places on the itinerary. On the last leg of the yatra was the Dera Sahib gurdwara in Lahore. 

All this while, contact with kith and kin was limited to making calls from the telephone sets installed by the hosts in the gurdwara precincts. For, our mobile sets had fallen silent the moment we had crossed over to Wagah. Almost immediately after the gates on the border closed and as the train trundled into foreign soil, the lack of Internet and mobile data had considerably depleted the smartness of our phones. They were mostly coming in handy for clicking pictures. 

The morning after checking into Lahore, we were bundled into a fleet of buses to visit a couple of gurdwaras in the 150-km radius of the city. Riding through verdant fields, as we reached the secluded Gurdwara Darbar Sahib at Kartarpur, with drones keeping a watch on us, we realised that we were just 3 km from India —  from Dera Baba Nanak, to be exact. On a clear day, Indians can view the site that marks the final resting place of Guru Nanak. So near, yet so far! The borders hold back people on both sides. 

While I was partaking of a langar of karhi-chawal, I noticed a strange activity. Many pilgrims were intently radiating off to different directions, their mobile phones crackling in their ears. The signal had come alive! Crossing over the Ravi separating the two countries, not recognising the Radcliffe Line marking the border, the airwaves seemed to scoff at the manmade borders!