21-05-2025
How 2 Indian, Pakistani army officers, also friends, set up Wagah check-post
Over 500 years ago, in the 16th century, Sultan Sher Shah Suri (1472-1545 CE) built a road from Sonargaon in Bengal to Peshawar in Pakistan.
It is said that the ancient Uttarapatha (northern road), which had been used for trade, migration and conquest was used as a guide by Sher Shah, who has left an indelible mark on our history despite his short reign.
After the takeover of India, the British revamped and renamed it to the Grand Trunk (GT) Road, which remains in use. It was a route of hectic activity, crisscrossing provinces and cultures, traversing the stunning diversity from east India to the north-west frontier.
Rudyard Kipling, the famous chronicler of colonial India, wrote in Kim: 'The Grand Trunk Road is a wonderful spectacle. It runs straight, bearing without crowding India's traffic for fifteen hundred miles - such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world'.
The 1947 partition of India destroyed this river of people, which ran red with the blood of tens of thousands of overnight refugees for months. In less than seven weeks, millennia old bonds were shredded by the British who deployed a rookie lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe, to redraw the borders based on dated data. He snipped the GT Road at Wagah, a village lying almost halfway between what were then the twin cities of Amritsar and Lahore.
This tiny village, a dot on the border between the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and secular India, has become the most popular stage for the performance of nationalism for the vexed neighbours.
The militaries of India and Pakistan engage in a quotidian display of a ritual: the Beating Retreat- that contains patriotic songs being belted out from stadium-size speakers, patriotic sloganeering, and finally the centrepiece of the spectacle: the lowering of the two countries' flags in a well-choreographed performance of glares, foot-stomping, and other aggressive maneuvers.
While this daily ritual at the India-Pakistan border derives largely from British tradition, war dances are not new to the subcontinent. From the Maring Naga war dances from the north-east and Chau in Odisha to the Khattak attan in Peshawar, the custom is ancient as war itself.
Two Friends and Officers Set up Wagah Check Post
In October 1947, Brigadier Mohinder Singh Chopra, a 1928 graduate from Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and a decorated officer, was tasked with defending the open and turbulent Punjab border between the two countries. After taking command of the 123rd Indian Infantry Brigade in Amritsar, also his hometown, Chopra set about translating the cartographic division into an actual border on land. With no markers available this was an impossible challenge but one that had to be met.
On the Pakistani side, a similar responsibility was handed to Commanding Officer Nazir Ahmed, who had served with Chopra in the pre-partition British Indian Army, the two were close friends.
Chopra and Ahmed decided to meet at Wagah village and agreed to set up a temporary check post there. To ensure smooth transfer of people they also set up a point between Attari in India and Wagah. Chopra recalled in his journal, which was later published as a book ( 1947: A Soldier's Story- From the records of Maj Gen Mohindar Singh Chopra), 'some tents were pitched on either side, two sentry boxes painted in the national colours of each country, and a swing gate to regulate the refugee traffic was erected. Two flag masts were also put up on either side and a brass plate commemorating the historic event was installed.'
In Sadat Hasan Manto's tragic short story Toba Tek Singh about the utter confusion caused by the partition and the transfer of inmates from Lahore's mental asylum, it is at the no-man's land between the Pakistani and Indian check posts that the grief-stricken Bishan Singh collapses.
Thanks to the friendship between the two army officers, the Punjab sector remained largely peaceful during the first India-Pakistan war, which broke out in Kashmir in October 1947.
Since then, India and Pakistan have fought three large scale wars and numerous smaller conflicts, like the one just concluded. During each conflict the movement of people at Wagah-Attari border as well as the war dance is suspended.
Ironically, this performance in stage decorated with barbed wire, steel gates, scaffolding and uniformed guards seeking to flaunt its power to the other and to their respective publics, also ends up showcasing the similitude between them. That may be a nuanced interpretation but at its core this ritual at Wagah is emblematic of the rivalry between the conjoined twins locked in endless conflict.
Author Jisha Menon wrote in her work, The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan, and the Memory of Partition: 'The Wagah border rituals dramatise the national mimicry between India and Pakistan. The competitiveness and one-upmanship that shapes the relations between the two nations converge on ideas of identity and difference. This national mimicry, however, is amply demonstrated in other arenas as well; for example, in May 1998, Pakistan carried out six nuclear tests in response to India's five. Thus, the logic of this national mimicry extends to the more dangerous nuclear race between the two countries, explicitly dramatizing what is at stake in the serious play of theatre that at once marks and troubles the notion of national difference'.
Manto summed up the pain of partition and its madness with characteristic wryness. 'There behind wire, on one side, lay India and behind more barbed wire, on the other side, lay Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh', he wrote.
(Valay Singh is a journalist and author. Views expressed are personal.)
Get 360° coverage—from daily headlines to 100 year archives.
