Tags:
Journalism of Courage
NEW DELHI, February 25: After 52 long years, he went back to Lahore — the city of his birth and schooling. The last time he had seen it was on August 10, 1947. Then the city had been burning with the bitterness of Partition.
He had been on his way back from a 10-day RSS camp at Phagwara. The camp had been cut short by five days. But by the time he had reached home, his family had left Lahore. He first moved to another locality and then to a camp at the DAV college. By then, two trains full of slain bodies had already crossed the newly delineated borders.
“Before leaving, I had put a huge lock on the front-door of my house. The house is exactly the same as I had left it. No repairs, no alteration. Only the lock was missing and, yes, part of one roof,” he says.
What surprised the BJP Rajya Sabha chief-whip, Vijay Kumar Malhotra, most was that the roads bore the same name. “Our house was at the intersection of Guru Nanak Street and Shradhananda Street, opposite Shyam Gali. They still have the same names”!
The friendliness and spontaneous warmth with which he was received by the occupants of his ancestral house touched him. “The people living there have limited means. But there was no enmity. I walked through the house — saw the corner where I used to study, the room where I used to sleep. They have not been repaired the house. I took their photographs, they offered me tea.”
For Malhotra, the inaugural bus journey to Lahore as part of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee peace delegation was memorable. And for more reasons than one. “It was as much a personal journey which took me back to a world, I thought I had lost for ever!” Interestingly, his escort — a reporter of the popular Pakistani newspaper Jang — who voluntarily took him around Lahore in his own car was also the person who gave the only moment of discomfort in the entire trip.
“Someone had told him that I am the BJP chief-whip in the Rajya Sabha. So he zeroed on me to ask how it feels like being in Pakistan: “In India, you give anti-Kashmir, anti-Pakistan statements”.
“First, I told him I am, originally, from Lahore. And then I added that we are critical of the ISI action in Kashmir. Whether they are under your control or not, you have to take some responsibility for the killings of 20,000 civilians in Jammu and Kashmir. At the end of the conversation we were friends.” Next day Malhotra not only had breakfast with his new friend. He was escorted around the city with much care. “I went to my house. My school, my college. It was sentimental trip. I was the only member of Parliament in the team, who had a birth-link with Lahore”.
