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| Friday, 9 January 2004 |
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Muslim families eye reunions as Indo-Pak ties warm KAVDA, India, Jan 8 (Reuters) Miabai Halebodhra, a 70-year-old Muslim woman living on the western Indian border with Pakistan, hasn't seen her three daughters in 12 years. The reason? Her daughters are married to three brothers in Pakistan with which India has been at loggerheads for decades. "The only contact with my sisters was through a letter that would come once a year," said Amir Hassan, Halebodhra's son. "They once sent a cassette with recordings of the girls' voices for my mother to hear." An old woman with a deeply lined face, Halebodhra said she hopes she can finally meet her daughters now that India and Pakistan, who have fought three wars since 1947, are making a brave bid for peace. Halebodhra is among thousands of Muslims living in villages around Gujarat's Rann of Kutch desert, 70 km (42 miles) from the border, with close relatives in Pakistan's Sindh province. Most people in Kavda, a relatively quiet, prosperous village covered in lush green juliflora, a thorny creeper planted to check the desert's rapid expansion, rely on cattle for their living. The strong army and intelligence presence has given the town excellent roads and phones and uninterrupted power - unheard of in most Indian villages. People here could afford to make frequent visits to their kin across the border - that is until 1971, when India fought its second war with Pakistan. "After the 1971 war, there was strict vigilance at the border and visits through the desert in summer became difficult," said villager Rahimana Osman, who visited Pakistan in 1991 after the death of his older brother. People in the Kutch border villages say it was still easy to cross over to Pakistan through the desert and meet their relatives until 1989, when a separatist revolt erupted in Kashmir. "Until the early 1980s, there used to be marriage processions going to Pakistan from here," said Mirkhan P. Mutva Nadvi, who lives in Gorewali village. Now, thousands of Muslim families divided by partition of the subcontinent in 1947, are hoping the thaw in Indo-Pakistani relations will make it easier for them to meet up again. The nuclear-armed neighbours reached a breakthrough agreement on Tuesday to open formal talks and expressed confidence about settling their dispute over Kashmir, which brought them close to a fourth war two years ago. The two governments have already restored diplomatic ties and transport links. And in a major shift from Islamabad's stated policy, Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf recently offered to give up a 50-year-old demand for a U.N.-mandated referendum over disputed Kashmir, which lies at the heart of bilateral tensions. India accuses Pakistan of training and arming the guerrillas fighting its rule in Kashmir. Pakistan says it offers only moral support to the Kashmiri demand for self-determination. People in the Kutch, a vast stretch of sandy desert and salty marshlands on the western tip of India stretching into Pakistan, hope for a peace that will bring some cross-border trade and a measure of prosperity to their harsh land. Villagers eke out a living feeding cattle on the sparse vegetation or making the region's famous handicrafts, including mirrored embroidery. Many towns and villages are still recovering from a devastating earthquake in 2001 that killed about 20,000 people. "If the Berlin Wall can be demolished and the two Germanys unified, then why can't India and Pakistan unite?", said Nadvi "There is no wall between the two." |
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