From Mashobra to Islamabad

So much — and nothing at all — seems to have changed these past 39 years between Pakistan and India.

The great escape of the British burra sahibs from the heat and dust of Delhi and Lahore to the summer townships of Shimla and Murree, Mussoorie and Nathiagali allowed the post-independent elite to inherit their respective slices of the earth to imitate the summer habits of their forebears.

Shimla, of course, has a greater resonance because of the 1972 peace agreement signed between Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto — I still remember a young Benazir strolling down the Mall in her large, flared pants (we used to those days call them Oxford bags) — which has held, more or less, these last 39 years.

But just because there was such little security, doesn’t mean the two sides couldn’t keep a secret. Truth is, the Shimla agreement wasn’t really signed in Shimla, but in a village barely 10 kms away called Mashobra, where the British built a beautiful wooden structure with a shale roof, especially for the pleasure of the viceroy.

So in the summer of 1972 they brought the two big chiefs in a procession of cars, an aging employee of the president’s estate told me — oh yes, we like to obliterate the symbols of our British inheritance, perhaps because we’ve internalised them better than any other colony in the world, in nazarband fashion. That is, the car windows were fitted with curtains so that the outside world couldn’t check out the occupants.

Mashobra’s a much bigger village today. Half of Punjab, enriched by Manmohan Singh’s economic reform of the past two decades, has discovered it and proceeded to cut down the pine forest to build multiplex apartments.

It’s easy to see why. Himachal Pradesh, of which Shimla is the capital and Mashobra an adjacent, overgrown townlet, has the highest literacy rate in the country. All the kids go to school, especially girls, in their neatly oiled hair and bags slung over their backs. All summer long, if you have a hankering for the sights and sounds of these hills, you can hear children loudly reciting their numbers or alphabet.

Walking around Mashobra, near a temple to the Hindu goddess Kali, I found another interesting sign: The entire district has been declared free of public defecation, so all villagers must use appropriate public toilets. Several notices on the Mall in Shimla had also warned the population about spitting and smoking, with fines ranging from Rs200-500.

Here was a lesson from Mashobra. There had been others too, connecting the past with the present, if you wished to pay heed.

This week, the foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan met in Islamabad, promising once again to end their acrimony and get on with the business of life: An easier visa regime, more commerce, sporting contacts and pilgrimages, as well as the ‘recognition’ that terrorism posed a threat to peace and security and both sides must ‘fight and eliminate’ this scourge.

In 1972, in Mashobra, the two leaders had met in the aftermath of a war. In 2011, in Islamabad, both sides were still mouthing words to deal with insurgency and terror, new age proxies of that war.

So much — and nothing at all — seems to have changed these past 39 years.





Published in The Express Tribune, June 26^th, 2011.