Families heartbroken as Pakistan closes airspace for Indian planes, land border shut
KARACHI: A 79-year-old Pakistani man, Ali Hasan Baqai, lamented about not being able to meet his siblings living in India as he sat with his wife and grandchildren at his house in Pakistan's Karachi, hours after Pakistan closed its air space for Indian airlines on Thursday.
The move came in retaliation to a raft of actions by India after a deadly militant attack on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir that New Delhi says Pakistan is involved in. Pakistani officials have rejected the accusations.
The latest diplomatic crisis was triggered by the killing of 26 men at a popular tourist destination in Indian-administered Kashmir on Tuesday, in the worst attack on civilians since the 2008 Mumbai shootings. The tit-for-tat announcements took relations between the nuclear-armed neighbors, who have fought three wars, to the lowest level in years.
Whenever relations deteriorate between Pakistan and India, elderly Baqai is besieged with a feeling of longing for his siblings and his birthplace on the other side of the border with India.
'I was planning to visit India. My sisters there were also planning to travel to Pakistan. But all of a sudden this attack happened. We could not even think of it. The situation was absolutely normal but suddenly the situation turned bad,' Baqai told Reuters Television.
Ali was born in 1946 in Delhi, India, a year before the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. He was last able to visit Delhi in 2014. Two of his sisters, along with his mother, passed away in the subsequent years. His three brothers died in India last year.
'If we don't get a chance and the borders are closed for a long time, the only way left is we go to Dubai and meet each other there,' he said.
'You can't meet your relatives. We can neither go there, nor can they come. It has become a mockery now. There is no hope left.'
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