Borders, Borders, Everywhere
In the Christian calendar, yesterday was Hallow'een, the night the spirits of the dead cross the border between the afterlife and this world. Today was Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. But people in Delhi were subdued, says BBC News. No wonder - on Saturday bombers killed 62 people.
Not yet proven, but pretty likely, is that the culprits were Kashmiri separatists, trying to scupper the brokerage of a temporary peace deal between India and Pakistan. The Kashmir dispute is about the border between the area controlled by Pakistan and the area controlled by India. Simple enough stuff, but what actually is a border?
Well, a border doesn't really exist. Until independence in 1947, Pakistan and India were all under the same flag. Borders are merely ideas, arbitrary representations of some abstract concept. But people do tend to get upset about them, to the point of killing each other.
The recent earthquake in Pakistan has thrown the futility of this border dispute into sharp relief. There surely has been no better time for the two nuclear powers to set aside their differences. But no. It appears that sticking to their guns on the border issue is more important than getting to grips with the crisis itself.
The incident is also evidence again that whatever the 'War on Terror' is, it is something without borders. This is a fundamental difference in the conception of this 'war' and other wars.
Though the explosions on Saturday were to an extent about a border, the explosions on 7/7 which they so neatly paralleled are altogether more complex, nebulous even. As well as being All Souls' and Diwali, today was also the day that Londoners remembered the bombings.
And furthermore, terrorists seem to work outside the framework of national boundaries that the rest of us hold so sacrosanct. In Iraq, for example, it seems that weapons and militants are pouring over the 'borders'. No coincidence that the latest US military action was near the Syrian border.
If we are to progress, it's probably time then to re-examine what actually constitutes a border. There are some physical boundaries - mountain ranges, rivers etc. that demark different areas - but all too often it's different cultures that are the real borders and unifiers. That's why the London bombings came about - alienation from the culture that the terrorists lived within. That's why bombers in Iraq are able to move so freely - because the borders that we recognize to them are irrelevant.
The subcontinent must forget about these petty border issues and learn to deal with the more profound problems of two different cultures that live side by side. That's the real issue here, and not some petty line in the snow.
