Love, Hope and Heartbreak: A 1960-Journey Through History—Part I,
by Azam Gill
In 1960, the Indo-Pakistani conflict impacted Azam’s family reunion, highlighting the enduring bonds of family across borders and the human cost of political strife. An exclusive
WHEN my mother, sister and I went to India, it was still five years short of the ill-thought out and unnecessary 1965 war which ensured that cousins reeling from the fratricidal madness of the 1947 massacres, topped by the 1948 Kashmir War, would remain mired in deadly squabbles over self-identification, self-image and real estate. And ‘sir jee,’ the now ubiquitous cross-border, visa-free form of address linking vernacular Urdu and vernacular Hindi speakers in a sycophantic doublet had not even been conceived.
In 1959, General Ayub Khan, the President of Pakistan, had promoted himself to Field Marshal, not because of any laurels in battle field generalship, but only because he could. There was nobody to oppose him and, if there had been, he was sure that the result of the impending 1965 war predicted by his ‘son’ Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, progeny of a ‘Sir,’ brought up by an English nanny and, groomed by good old Berkley and Oxford, would take care of it.
We all know how that went down!
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