Columns: The Usual Suspects

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India Today, March 8, 1999
March 8, 1999

THE USUAL SUSPECTS
Distance to Lahore

A walk down Aitchison College.

By Swapan Dasgupta

It's not surprising that no one in the Eminent Persons' Group accompanying Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to Lahore took the short walk from the Pearl Continental Hotel to the sprawling Aitchison College campus. The erstwhile Chief's College, founded in 1886 as a training ground for the natives who were born to rule-another Mayo College, Ajmer-doesn't fit the stereotype. It has neither the oriental mystique of Anarkali bazaar nor the Islamic modernism of the Minar-e-Pakistan. An institution where the better students-with blazers proclaiming their "academic" status-read for A-levels, where the cricket pavilion is straight out of Cheltenham and where the school maintains some 80 horses, is everything the two countries no longer aspire to. We rarely meet Aitchisonians at mushairas; we strike friendships at Oxford.

Yet, Aitchison symbolises all that is right and wrong with our attitude towards our neighbour. A walk from a back gate into the administration block presents an instant surprise. There, encased by a red brick building, is the white-painted conical roof of a temple, complete with brass trishul. It's a reminder of a past, like the plaques outside the lecture rooms commemorating endowments from the Rana Sahib of Jubbal and Lakshmi Devi of Vahali. It's a past that modern Pakistan wants to overlook and do-gooder Indians seem intent on constantly resurrecting.

Take the scroll of honour listing the school's prefects. The one outside the lecture rooms, adjoining the long row of photographs of past students in their innocent years. The list begins from 1948!

It's a sort of cut-off point that many Indians-particularly the pesky alumni of Government College, Lahore, on our side of the Radcliffe Line-seem loath to digest. There is nothing more disconcerting for a young nation like Pakistan than being constantly barraged with unwanted nostalgia about life before August 14, 1947. The older generation hates it and the younger lot are puzzled by it. For Pakistanis, the Indian visitor rabbiting on about composite culture in stilted Urdu is both an object of ridicule and suspicion. Ridicule because it is contrived and suspicion because it invokes fears of hegemonism.

That is why it was a great gesture for Vajpayee to visit the site of the Muslim League's Pakistan resolution in 1940. It was the real "defining moment"-yesterday's champion of akhand Bharat putting his stamp of legitimacy on Pakistan. The prime minister drove home the point in his brilliant extempore speech at the civic reception on the lawns of the Governor's House. He spoke in Hindi, with a smattering of Urdu words. He referred to Nawaz Sharif as pradhan mantri, not wazir-e-azam. He wore a dhoti, not the make-believe attire that Jawaharlal Nehru made our national dress. Vajpayee didn't try to be what India is not.

It went down well with Pakistan. It went down well with Indians for whom Lahore is about as familiar as Dhaka and Kabul. These cities once constituted India. The clock cannot be turned back. Pakistanis hate their own people who go mushy about Azamgarh and Lucknow while living in Karachi. They have reason to. We are neighbours with a common boundary wall. We can be civil to each other, play cricket-like the Aitchison boys have done-and even install a common burglar alarm. It's the crass who confuse neighbourliness with familiarity. They don't do that at Aitchison.

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