Kashmiris call for end to India-Pakistan divide

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SRINAGAR, Aug 13 (AFP): Mughlia Begum was just 18 when partition shook the sub-continent on August 14, 1947. In the bloody turmoil, she lost her father Abdul Aziz, who worked in Peshawar as a cook.
Unable to reach the Indian side of the fractured state of Kashmir, he stayed put in the new Muslim nation of Pakistan and remarried, while still trying to return to visit the other wife and four daughters left behind.
Abdul Aziz never made it back.
"It was a telegram that informed us of Aziz's death," says Begum's daughter- in-law Hafiza Nazir, who received the message in 1980.
"It reached us two months after his death and devastated us."
Kashmir is awash with stories of families and friends butchered or lost in the frenzy of one of the largest migrations in history-and many from the Indian half of the state now say such tales are better left in the past.
For the last three years, the guns have gone silent on the heavily- armed Line of Control (LoC) that divides the Himalayan outpost between India and Pakistan.
New Delhi and Islamabad have re-established bus and other links to unite divided families as part of an effort to make the de facto border "irrelevant", in the words of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Begum says that after 60 years, it is an idea whose time has come.
"Take it from me, this LoC will not be there. People will dismantle it like the German (Berlin) wall," she told the news agency at her cozy house in Indian Kashmir's summer capital Srinagar.
"I know the real pain of partition. I was angry with my father for having left us alone but later I came to know he wanted to return but failed," Begum says as she wipes away tears with her white headscarf.
Kashmiri Habib Ullah, 90, was in Karachi when the subcontinent was cut up and found himself in the western wing of Pakistan.
He managed to navigate a minefield of bureaucracy and returned to the Indian side of Kashmir this year for a month-long visit, as India and Pakistan eased visa rules under their three- year-old peace process.
"I am happy. I am with my brother and other relatives," Ullah says, adding that he had also managed to return to his birthplace in 1983 for just a few days.
"This border should go. We don't recognise it," he says, hugging his brother, shortly before evening prayers.
The 1947 partition created Muslim-majority West and East Pakistan, separated by 1,600 kilometres (1,000 miles) across India as well as language. It was drawn up by British jurist Cyril Radcliffe who had only rough maps, a few weeks and no visits to decide on the lines that would rent asunder the subcontinent.
The result was as many as one million dead as Hindus and Muslims attacked each other.
Kashmir was ruled by a Hindu, Maharaja Hari Singh, when India and Pakistan split. Singh wanted to keep the Muslim- majority state independent, but raids by Pakistan-backed tribesmen led him to accede to India.