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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (46249)	5/22/2004 3:18:10 AM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50167

In a quirky happenstance, both leaders of India and Pakistan were born in what is now enemy territory. President Pervez Musharraf was born in Delhi. India’s prime minister-elect may have left GAH more than 60 years ago, but this native son has become India’s prime minister-elect. “I am very happy a son of our village is going to be the prime minister of India,” said Raja Gulsher, a farmer who served in the medical corp during the 1965 war, one of three fought with India since Partition in 1947. “If any of the air and water in this place has had an effect on him, he will strike a friendship with Pakistan.” Both men carry memories of those tumultuous times when the subcontinent was divided, millions of Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus were killed, and Pakistan was created. Manmohan Singh has pledged to work with President Musharraf to put decades of enmity between their nations behind them. Welcome awaits Manmohan Singh in Pakistani birthplace The people of Gah have a good feeling about Manmohan Singh. Gulsher said he knows it won’t be easy for Singh. “We know his constraints. Even then I am sure he will maintain friendship with us. If he comes to our village I’ll be the first to welcome him,” he added. The pace of life in this rural backwater some 80 km southwest of Islamabad hasn’t changed much since Singh was raised here in the 1930s. Traffic races over the nearby motorway, but there is no road from it to Gah. Women still draw water by hand from the wells, where Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs of a bygone era once filled their pitchers from separate pools. They have electricity these days, and some have televisions. But the modern world makes few intrusions among the mud walled homes or down the narrow uneven lanes of this community of less than two thousand people and their cattle, sheep and goats. What has changed now is that everyone is a Muslim. When Singh attended the government primary school in the late 1930s, Hindus and Sikhs accounted for about half of Gah’s population. “We used to live without any problem. We used to help each other,” said another farmer Mohammad Khan about relations between Muslims and Hindus. “They were half of the population. We used to play together, we used to fight together, we used to study together.” “I was grazing cattle when people came running towards me saying the village has been attacked. I could see smoke and fire coming out of the village,” he said. Manmohan Singh’s father moved his family from Gah some years earlier and during the upheaval of Partition, the dried fruit merchant moved to the western Indian city of Amritsar. Memories in Gah have faded. Farmer Ahmed Khan can’t remember attending class with the young Manmohan Singh, though the school register shows they were contemporaries. But Khan, while tilling his field under the scorching sun with temperatures soaring above 40 Celsius, said he was proud of the fact today. “It’s a matter of great happiness. I would want him to be prime minister of India and he should come and visit his village,” he added. reuters dailytimes.com.pk