Speaker 1: Yeah, m. This audio is from a daily ceremony that
Speaker 1: takes place between India and Pakistan that started in It
Speaker 1: is held at the Waga Border, the most prominent border
Speaker 1: crossing between these two countries. The last time I was
Speaker 1: in Pakistan was three years ago. On that trip, I
Speaker 1: witnessed the Wagga Border ceremony. My family and I were
Speaker 1: visiting Lahore, located in the province of Punjab, which was
Speaker 1: a major area of conflict during partition. Lahore is located
Speaker 1: only fifty two miles away from India and my experience
Speaker 1: at the border was unforgettable. From I Heart Radio, I'm
Speaker 1: Nahasis and this is partition a podcast that will take
Speaker 1: a closer look into this often forgotten part of history.
Speaker 1: My family's last trip to Pakistan was for three weeks.
Speaker 1: This gave us time to explore more parts of the country,
Speaker 1: and Lahore was high on the list. It is filled
Speaker 1: with stunning architecture dating back to the Mughal Empire. I
Speaker 1: love Garachi, after all, it's where I was born, but
Speaker 1: in terms of culture, Lahore has my birthplace beat. We
Speaker 1: do have amazing food though. While outlining our travel plans,
Speaker 1: my dad mentioned a ceremony Confused, I asked what he
Speaker 1: was talking about. He told me that every evening, a
Speaker 1: military event between India and Pakistan takes place. This ceremony
Speaker 1: was one of the first things we saw when we
Speaker 1: arrived in the whore, and it was the epitome of
Speaker 1: a spectacle. During our visit, the air was filled with smog,
Speaker 1: which made our journey to get there all the more formidable.
Speaker 1: Cars were only allowed so far and we eventually had
Speaker 1: to walk the rest of the way to the stadium
Speaker 1: where the ceremony would take place. On the way, we
Speaker 1: had to go through numerous security checkpoints. As we made
Speaker 1: our way to the entrance, I tried to get my bearings.
Speaker 1: Walking along the crowd to get to the stadium was
Speaker 1: just very bizarre. I'm not sure how long we were
Speaker 1: walking for, but it felt like at least forty five minutes.
Speaker 1: We were walking on the same roads where absolute carnage
Speaker 1: took place over seventy years ago. A shiver ran down
Speaker 1: my spine. The majority of people I saw were filled
Speaker 1: with excitement and anticipation to witness this tradition. I only
Speaker 1: noticed a handful of people realized the melancholy of where
Speaker 1: we were and what we were doing. Both sides of
Speaker 1: the road were fenced off with barbed wire, indicating that
Speaker 1: the other side was Indian territory. The land beyond the
Speaker 1: fence seemed vast and endless. I turned to my mom
Speaker 1: and said, is this the closest I will ever get
Speaker 1: to India. She didn't give me a verbal response, but
Speaker 1: instead gave me a look that conveyed all I needed
Speaker 1: to know. As we continued our journey, I couldn't help
Speaker 1: noticing the amount of school children that were there. I
Speaker 1: saw many different uniforms. I wanted to ask if they
Speaker 1: were from a local or nearby school, or did they
Speaker 1: travel from other provinces. I wondered what they were taught
Speaker 1: about the continuous strife between these two places. I didn't
Speaker 1: really know how to feel during the ceremony. At its core,
Speaker 1: it's a daily military practice for the Indian and Pakistani armies,
Speaker 1: a forty five minute long sequence of marches and songs.
Speaker 1: It's spoken of as a display of cooperation and brotherhood
Speaker 1: between these two nations. In person, it was almost like
Speaker 1: a scene straight out of Gladiator. Thunderous claps and cheering performers,
Speaker 1: flag waving snacks being sold. Did my family and I
Speaker 1: buy some popcorn, absolutely, but didn't make the concept any
Speaker 1: less strange, not at all. The performance has two parts,
Speaker 1: the beating retreat and the changing of the guard, performed
Speaker 1: by the India Border Security Force and the Pakistan Rangers.
Speaker 1: Respective sides were separated by two gates that open and closed.
Speaker 1: During this theatrical production, Indian and Pakistani soldiers march in
Speaker 1: perfect unison. The flags of both countries are lowered and
Speaker 1: they partake in puffery and intimidation. Think of a male
Speaker 1: peacock trying to attract a mate. The Pakistan Rangers were
Speaker 1: black uniforms while the Indian Border Security Force were as
Speaker 1: khaki uniforms, with both sides sporting pops of color. These
Speaker 1: colors demanded attention with every hand raise and leg kick.
Speaker 1: The gates first open as the sun sets. The flags
Speaker 1: are folded after they are lowered, and a no nonsense
Speaker 1: handshake takes place to conclude the end of the ceremony.
Speaker 1: After the handshakes, the iron gates of the border close again.
Speaker 1: During the entire event, visitors sing their national anthems and
Speaker 1: chance slogans of Bakistan's in the body, which means long
Speaker 1: lived the land of pure or victory to Bakistan and
Speaker 1: jay Hind victory to Indian h Long live India across
Speaker 1: the way. As I sat in the stadium, letting everything
Speaker 1: in front of me sink in, I couldn't help but
Speaker 1: think what were we all supposed to take away from this?
Speaker 1: Is it all fun in games? Or does it build antagonism?
Speaker 1: The idea behind it is to symbolize respect in addition
Speaker 1: to rivalry between the two nations, But ultimately it's a
Speaker 1: source of national and patriotic pride. There is no shame
Speaker 1: in being proud of your heritage and where you come from.
Speaker 1: But I think it's important to realize that our identities
Speaker 1: are so entwined with each other. One does not exist
Speaker 1: without the other. Our culture, language, food, and countless other
Speaker 1: entities are cut from the same cloth. Yet decades later,
Speaker 1: there are so much anger, bias, and hurt. As I've
Speaker 1: said again and again, partition continues to haunt our daily lives.
Speaker 1: I asked how these two governments can have a daily
Speaker 1: ceremony together, a ceremony that started over sixty years ago,
Speaker 1: when their relationships with each other are so troubled. I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: but you cannot have a ceremony that represents respect and
Speaker 1: friendship when Indian and Pakistani people are barred from visiting
Speaker 1: the other country just because of where they were born
Speaker 1: in familial ties. As I discussed a little later, it
Speaker 1: wasn't always like this. This illusion of friendship, which is
Speaker 1: really a disguise for hateful policies and violent rivalry stemming
Speaker 1: from the British made border made me think of something
Speaker 1: I noticed when my family and I began to walk
Speaker 1: towards the stadium. In the distance, I could see both
Speaker 1: India's and Bokistan's flags waving in the wind. My dad
Speaker 1: noticed I was looking at them and said that India
Speaker 1: had put up a flag first and Pakistan followed suit,
Speaker 1: but purposely made their flag higher than theirs. I asked
Speaker 1: if he was kidding. It's the to my mind to
Speaker 1: look this up at the time, but when writing this
Speaker 1: episode I did and he definitely was not kidding. In March,
Speaker 1: India put up a flag that was three d sixty
Speaker 1: ft tall. Five months later, Bakistan decided to put up
Speaker 1: a flag of their own, but at four hundred ft.
Speaker 1: The Hindustan Times reported in July that India plans to
Speaker 1: create an even larger flag, one that is fifty ft
Speaker 1: higher than the current one they have in place, making
Speaker 1: it ten feet taller than Pakistan's. And I'm sure once
Speaker 1: that happens, Bakistan will make a larger one and the
Speaker 1: madness will continue. There are some, I'm sure who see
Speaker 1: this news and feel a deep sense of pride or
Speaker 1: find a comical I personally can't help but see it
Speaker 1: as a waste of time, energy, and money when there
Speaker 1: are real needs to be addressed. The majority of our
Speaker 1: conversations on the border have dealt with how difficult it
Speaker 1: is for many Indians and Pakistanis to visit the other side.
Speaker 1: But why and what other underlying issues caused each government
Speaker 1: to deny visa applications from people of the other country.
Speaker 1: Since partition, India and Pakistan continue to have deeply tense relations.
Speaker 1: Both countries have nuclear weapons and continue to fight over Kashmir,
Speaker 1: even with numerous wars already under their belts. It should
Speaker 1: be noted that the dispute over Kashmir and other tensions
Speaker 1: between these nations are very intricate and complex, so for
Speaker 1: the purposes of this episode, I'll be using a handful
Speaker 1: of examples to illustrate how tensions between the two countries
Speaker 1: manifest today. My research interests are about refugee ease and
Speaker 1: borders in South Asia, and so as a consequence of that,
Speaker 1: I'm obviously interested in Partition. That is dr ant an
Speaker 1: historian and professor of international relations at Royal Holloway University
Speaker 1: in London. I wanted to ask her about the border
Speaker 1: from more of an historical lens. I first asked her
Speaker 1: about these borders over the last seventy five years, they
Speaker 1: have gone through different periods of accessibility. I have a
Speaker 1: picture of my fraternal grandparents in front of the taj
Speaker 1: Mahal in the sixties, shortly after my dad was born.
Speaker 1: The likelihood of that picture being taken in two is
Speaker 1: extremely small. First of all, the kind of whole visa
Speaker 1: and passport regime has a much longer history. So in
Speaker 1: order to understand where that comes from, I think you
Speaker 1: actually have to go back to partition and both India
Speaker 1: and Pakistan trying to work out, as I said, who
Speaker 1: belongs and who doesn't. And in that process two things
Speaker 1: emerged a forman system first and then a passport system.
Speaker 1: So before the visas, they came passports for these people,
Speaker 1: right and why did these systems emerge. The permit system
Speaker 1: really emerges because many Muslims who go to Pakistan want
Speaker 1: to come back to India and the Indian government is
Speaker 1: worried because many of these people have left property behind
Speaker 1: property to the Indian government calls evacuate property and was
Speaker 1: going to hand this over to Hindus and Seeks. So
Speaker 1: if these Muslims come back and claim this property, that
Speaker 1: causes a problem. So they make them apply for permits.
Speaker 1: And the permits that are given to Muslims are different
Speaker 1: to the permits that are given to Hindus and Seeks
Speaker 1: in this period. So although ostensibly Naru has declared India
Speaker 1: to be a secular state, there is a difference in
Speaker 1: the way in which Hindus and Muslims are crossing this border.
Speaker 1: Even in Nhru was the first Prime Minister of India.
Speaker 1: The passport system interesting is introduced at the behest of Pakistan,
Speaker 1: but not quite at the behested Pakistan. But Pakistan has
Speaker 1: a greater hand in the passport system. And the reason
Speaker 1: they introduce it is because actually they are overwhelmed by
Speaker 1: the number of Muslims who are coming into Pakistan and
Speaker 1: in order to stop that floor, they introduced another document
Speaker 1: that would make people's lives harder and more difficult. And
Speaker 1: the way this plays out in the next sort of
Speaker 1: a few decades is that both countries see crossing this
Speaker 1: border are acquiring this passport as a sign that you
Speaker 1: have made a choice. But again, as I said to
Speaker 1: you in answer to an earlier question, people's lives are complicated.
Speaker 1: So some people across the border and they make a choice,
Speaker 1: and then they want to turn the clock back or
Speaker 1: the acquire a passport. And then they say no, but
Speaker 1: we want to go back. We want either claim property
Speaker 1: or we're not happy here. We want to go back
Speaker 1: to our own lives. And so if you look at
Speaker 1: sort of Indian constitutional records as well as court cases,
Speaker 1: there are many, many of these court cases about people
Speaker 1: who are trying to claim citizenship, trying to claim passports,
Speaker 1: usually Muslims, who may have made decisions to go back
Speaker 1: and then come back again. So this history gets very,
Speaker 1: very messy. Much like any situation in which there are
Speaker 1: disputes between countries and governments, it all boils down to
Speaker 1: who is in charge. So you have this regime of
Speaker 1: permits and passports. That's first of all, creating this bonder.
Speaker 1: Then over the next sort of a few decades, whether
Speaker 1: the border is open or closed, as you rightly said,
Speaker 1: is often a question of geopolitics. It's you know, down
Speaker 1: to who's in power, who's not in power. You know.
Speaker 1: So there was at one point of bus that went
Speaker 1: to Lahore. There was a train that went to Dhaka, right,
Speaker 1: So there's this kind of bus diplomacy that are trains
Speaker 1: on the eastern side of the border. And then every
Speaker 1: so often something happens like the Cargill War, and these
Speaker 1: are shut down, you know. So there are moments in
Speaker 1: which diplomacy opens up these borders and moments in which
Speaker 1: the borders are closed. The Cargo War took place for
Speaker 1: over two months, and it is one of the wars
Speaker 1: between India and Pakistan overland and Kashmir. But what I
Speaker 1: think is really interesting about the borders themselves, and I
Speaker 1: did say earlier that we should think about the borders
Speaker 1: is not just physical objects. But if we just see
Speaker 1: them as physical objects, as people kind of stamping your
Speaker 1: passport as you cross the border and so and so forth,
Speaker 1: is that actually, as I said, the border in the
Speaker 1: west has always been harder to cross, and In fact,
Speaker 1: there was a time when post did not go across
Speaker 1: the border. So if you posted a parcel from India
Speaker 1: to Pakistan and went to Dubai, right because you paid
Speaker 1: a crazy amount of But as I said, the border
Speaker 1: in the east used to be open for a much
Speaker 1: longer period of time. But that border has now been militarized.
Speaker 1: There is now a barbed wire fence and India has
Speaker 1: been in the process of kind of creating a wall there.
Speaker 1: So the discourse around the border, around who is allowed
Speaker 1: to cross the border has also changed. Whereas once upon
Speaker 1: a time that eastern border would have been relatively easy
Speaker 1: to cross. There used to be something called an Indo
Speaker 1: Bangladesh passport, for instance, that you could simply used to
Speaker 1: cross that border. So Hindus who had families either in
Speaker 1: Bangladesh or we're living in Bangladesh and families and India
Speaker 1: could simply use an Indo Bangladesh passport and vice versa
Speaker 1: across that border. That passport was abolished, I believe in
Speaker 1: two thousands teen or something. Ada points out what happens
Speaker 1: within these countries is just as important as what is
Speaker 1: happening outside of them, and I will argue that the
Speaker 1: opening and closing of those borders is not just about
Speaker 1: you know, who's in power and so on, but it's
Speaker 1: also to do with internal politics, right about minorities, particularly
Speaker 1: in India. And again if you look east, as that
Speaker 1: border was created, that militarized border, that has gone hand
Speaker 1: in hand with the writing of a new Citizenship Act,
Speaker 1: a new citizenship Act that kind of goes back on
Speaker 1: earlier conceptions of secularism and now makes India home for
Speaker 1: South Asia's Hindus and seeks quite explicitly in Episode one,
Speaker 1: I said that India would be home to the Hindu
Speaker 1: Sikh majority, but it would also be more secular than Pakistan.
Speaker 1: As Ada says, the amendment to the Citizen Act has
Speaker 1: removed this notion. The Citizenship Amendment Bill was designed to
Speaker 1: amend the Citizenship Act of nineteen fifty five to recognize
Speaker 1: specific types of immigrants segregated by religion and country of origin.
Speaker 1: Under the citizens Amendment Act, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Barsis
Speaker 1: and Sikhs who had migrated from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Bakistan
Speaker 1: to India prior to twenty fourteen are no longer considered
Speaker 1: illegal immigrants. And have a better chance to obtain citizenship. However,
Speaker 1: notably Jews and Muslims are left out of the amendment,
Speaker 1: which makes this a prejudiced policy against the religions of
Speaker 1: Islam and Judaism in India. This legislation led to protest
Speaker 1: all around India for its blatant exclusion of minority fates.
Speaker 1: So I would say these questions around who is allowed
Speaker 1: to get a visa who is not when these open
Speaker 1: up are also a product of domestic politics. And these
Speaker 1: domestic calculations around which minorities are seen to be legitimate
Speaker 1: and you know, how we can make people lives more
Speaker 1: difficult internally has an impact on external broad acrosses, all
Speaker 1: of these rules and regulations get further complicated because not
Speaker 1: only is this accessibility based on yourself and your faith,
Speaker 1: but also where your parents and grandparents are from. If
Speaker 1: you are applying for a visa to India but your
Speaker 1: parents or your grandparent was born in what is today Pakistan,
Speaker 1: that's a much more complicated process, right. There extra forms
Speaker 1: to fill out. This isn't just about your passport or
Speaker 1: your nationality. There is a sort of grandfather and grandmothering
Speaker 1: of these of these causes, and again let's deliberate. The
Speaker 1: idea of identity politics really comes into play as more
Speaker 1: time passes. But what's interesting is that in the two thousands,
Speaker 1: India introduces an overseas Indian citizenship and introduces a person
Speaker 1: of Indian Origin card and then overseas Indian citizenship. And
Speaker 1: the way that legislation is written is very interesting because
Speaker 1: technically most pakistani Is or many Pakistanis would be eligible
Speaker 1: to become persons of Indian origin or overseas Indian citizens right.
Speaker 1: That piece of Indian legislation is primarily kind of directed
Speaker 1: at the wealthy diasport to try and get money back. Clearly,
Speaker 1: you know, some countries like Fiji et cetera, which saw
Speaker 1: invented labor from India were excluded from that list, right,
Speaker 1: But also it was specifically written to exclude Kistan and
Speaker 1: Bangladesation so on, so that you know, people from those
Speaker 1: countries could not claim overseas Indian citizenship status, right. And
Speaker 1: so for me, I think a lot of these conversations
Speaker 1: are really really connected, these conversations about border crossing, the
Speaker 1: conversations about diasporic South Asians, as well as conversations within
Speaker 1: India about minorities. I think these are always intimately and
Speaker 1: intricately linked. All of my grandparents were born in India,
Speaker 1: which makes me a person of Indian origin. I can
Speaker 1: trace this fact back several generations, I'm sure. But because
Speaker 1: they were forced to move during partition and I was
Speaker 1: subsequently born in Pakistan, this legislation does not apply to me.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people, as I said in
Speaker 1: ninety seven, made a bunch of choices, not knowing what
Speaker 1: the long term consequences of those choices would be, or
Speaker 1: not expecting the long term consequences of those choices to
Speaker 1: be what they turned out to be, and the ways
Speaker 1: in which would be very hard to turn the clock back.
Speaker 1: We also have to think in terms of privilege. I
Speaker 1: think about this a lot when I think about personal
Speaker 1: histories of Partition and the subcontinent, because the histories that
Speaker 1: have been written and the histories that have been told
Speaker 1: are so overwhelmingly upper class and uppercast. Right, the vast
Speaker 1: majority of the people who moved were working class people,
Speaker 1: and they had fewer options than many of the uppercast
Speaker 1: supper class people who moved across these borders. Right, So
Speaker 1: how you moved across the border. What you took with
Speaker 1: you and then what happened to you after you cross
Speaker 1: the border was very closely linked to your social status
Speaker 1: before you cross the border. So even those Pajabis in particular,
Speaker 1: who came across and who had very little, but who
Speaker 1: belonged to a certain social strata or who had the
Speaker 1: education or who had the connections, were able to thrive
Speaker 1: in a way that many working class people struggle to
Speaker 1: do so. And we know that that is particularly true
Speaker 1: of the the Lit community that moved from Eastern Bengal
Speaker 1: into West Bengal. Unther I mentioned the delt community, individuals
Speaker 1: belonging to the lowest cast. We're at the point where
Speaker 1: we're collecting all of these partitions stories where we're almost
Speaker 1: sort of curating partition for the next generation. But whose
Speaker 1: stories are we curating. There's some really interesting work that
Speaker 1: shows that both India and Pakistan wrote that the Lit
Speaker 1: citizens out of their histories, but were panicked because many
Speaker 1: of these citizens did everyday jobs that the two new
Speaker 1: countries needed people to do, so try to retain them
Speaker 1: desperately while at the same time writing them out of
Speaker 1: their histories. When we step back and we look at
Speaker 1: these broader histories, gender, class, cast, religion. All of these
Speaker 1: are so closely intertwined in how we understand, you know,
Speaker 1: not just border crossing in ninety seven, but what happens
Speaker 1: to those people in the next seventy five years. We
Speaker 1: go on to discuss refugees and they're eatment in a
Speaker 1: new place. I shouldn't have been shocked to learn that
Speaker 1: who is and isn't considered a refugee also leaned into
Speaker 1: the notion of identity politics. I think that's a really
Speaker 1: important history of partition, that people didn't just cross a
Speaker 1: border and become seamlessly integrated into the new nation state. Right.
Speaker 1: And India and Pakistan both refused to sign the nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty one UN Convention on Refugees, which defines who are refugees,
Speaker 1: and the reason they refused to do that has to
Speaker 1: do with the Eurocentric nature of it, has to do
Speaker 1: with the fact that it defined refugees as emerging from
Speaker 1: the war in Europe and so on and and so forth.
Speaker 1: But the consequences of India and Pakistan not signing that
Speaker 1: you still never signed it is that these people who
Speaker 1: crossed the border are known as various things. Sometimes there
Speaker 1: are refugees. Sometimes they're displaced persons in official discourse. Sometimes
Speaker 1: they're migrants, and a lot of this is to do
Speaker 1: with how they are then treated. So we know from
Speaker 1: the exting literature, for instance, that the Punjabi refugees are
Speaker 1: seen as genuine refugees because the Indian government argues they
Speaker 1: fled violence and they are hard working and we deserve
Speaker 1: to give them compensation and rehabilitation. Whereas these Bengali Is
Speaker 1: are lazy and they did not flee the same kind
Speaker 1: of violence that the Punjabis fled from, So somehow they're
Speaker 1: kind of claim to refugeehood is less authentic, and then
Speaker 1: they claim that therefore they don't deserve the same degree
Speaker 1: of rehabilitation. But of course people keep coming and eventually
Speaker 1: the Indian state tries to resettle them, and some of
Speaker 1: these quite badly thought through rehabilitation schemes in Central India,
Speaker 1: which fail because you can't just move people to arid
Speaker 1: land and expect them to cultivate it overnight. But then
Speaker 1: that's further seen as proof that these Bengali is only
Speaker 1: one charity. They're not hard working like the Punjabis and
Speaker 1: therefore truly deserving a rehabilitation. So groups of people who
Speaker 1: cross borders at the same time their faiths can turn
Speaker 1: out to be very friend depending on who they are,
Speaker 1: where they crossed the border and the communities into which
Speaker 1: they crossing too, right, And so those stories are really
Speaker 1: really quite complex. Over the past few weeks, you've heard
Speaker 1: several stories about people and their homes getting left behind,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to know if I thought if there
Speaker 1: could be a time where maybe the process for everyone
Speaker 1: to visit these countries would be easier. Forced border crossing
Speaker 1: in South Asia is traumatic, and when forest border crossing
Speaker 1: everybody is traumatic. But there are some truly traumatic stories
Speaker 1: in South Asian and that's seven one. There are expulsions
Speaker 1: of stateless people in South Asia. There's kind of ongoing
Speaker 1: trauma the Ranga is and so these stories are never
Speaker 1: going to end in some ways, right, and in a
Speaker 1: way I think that the kind of individual reconciliations were
Speaker 1: subsumed within both India and Pakistan's original intention to almost
Speaker 1: we raised partition, right, you know, we didn't have a
Speaker 1: partition museum in India will very recently an independence day
Speaker 1: in our fourteenth of August. In Pakistan, fifteenth of augustin
Speaker 1: India is always focused on independence and then displaying a
Speaker 1: military hardware rather than the trauma partition. And that was
Speaker 1: a completely deliberate choice, right to raise some of those
Speaker 1: histories to subsume them within this broader narrative, So a
Speaker 1: sort of macro cosm of what happens at the Waga
Speaker 1: Atry border, right, if you think of it that way.
Speaker 1: So that's one of the reasons why those individual stories
Speaker 1: have been kind of lost or don't get priority. And
Speaker 1: you were asking what the kind of the future of
Speaker 1: this might be like and what we can hope for,
Speaker 1: and I can't predict that future, but you know, we
Speaker 1: know that every time there is upheople in South Asia,
Speaker 1: it creates more forced migration across borders. And you know
Speaker 1: we know that for a fact, and in general, theoretically,
Speaker 1: I like to think of borders as entirely artificial constructs, right.
Speaker 1: And as someone who's lived on kind of three continents,
Speaker 1: I was born on one continent, my children were born
Speaker 1: on a different continent. We spent a lot of time
Speaker 1: in North America. For me, border crossing has always been
Speaker 1: an everyday part of my life. It's been an expensive
Speaker 1: part of my life. But in the grand scheme of think,
Speaker 1: my privilege has made it not that stressful, stressful, if
Speaker 1: I'm honest, not that stressful, right. Whereas for a lot
Speaker 1: of people in South Asia crossing these borders, and if
Speaker 1: you can look at the kind of India Bangladesh border,
Speaker 1: for people this this is a question of their livelihood
Speaker 1: and every time they cross that border, they take their
Speaker 1: life into their own hands in order to make ends meet.
Speaker 1: So for me, I don't see an end to the
Speaker 1: ways in which these borders have become securitized. I don't
Speaker 1: think we're ever going to roll the clock back on that.
Speaker 1: Seventy five years of violence and turmoil is a lot
Speaker 1: to unpack. It's hard to imagine where you would even
Speaker 1: begin to have this conversation. Both governments are aware of
Speaker 1: what the people of India and Pakistan had to bear
Speaker 1: when it came to partition and contain enuously. Closing off
Speaker 1: these borders is truly an awful way to repay them.
Speaker 1: There is no time like the present to make amends
Speaker 1: for the past. Our next episode will be our last.
Speaker 1: These past nine weeks, you've heard interviews from survivors, historians, artists,
Speaker 1: and other creatives discuss how partition is a part of them.
Speaker 1: But where do we go from here? How can we
Speaker 1: take all of these thoughts and discussions and turn them
Speaker 1: into actions. How has this tragedy taught us about what
Speaker 1: is currently going on in the world. Education and empathy
Speaker 1: are at the heart of all these questions. Until next week,
Speaker 1: I'm Nahasie's and this is Partition. Partition was developed as
Speaker 1: a part of the Next Up initiative created by Anna Hosnier,
Speaker 1: Joel Monique and Yes Sinia mit En. Partition is produced
Speaker 1: by Anna Hosnier, Tricia Mukerjee and Beca Ramos. It is
Speaker 1: edited by Rory Gagan, with the original score composed by
Speaker 1: Mark Hadley.