SCRATCHED across Pashtun hearts!

It is now only a question of time before the demand for the reunification of all their people becomes a rallying call for the Pashtun nation across the artificial, colonial Afghan border
Mohan Guruswamy Delhi

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has put Balochistan on the Indo-Pak agenda. So why not Pashtunistan?
Just as Balochistan was annexed by Pakistan in 1948, the Pashtun homelands that now make up the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA) were annexed by the British just 70 years before they departed from the sub-continent. It's a pity few in India know what really Pakistan is all about. Even today they dare not refer to the NWFP and FATA as Pashtunistan or Pathanistan or anything that would confer upon them a sub-nationality within Pakistan. As it is in the case of Punjab, Sind and Balochistan.

Let's go back a bit into the past before we attempt to undo the present.

In 1886, a Russian army fresh from its conquest of the Oasis of Merv, in today's Turkmenistan, occupied the Panjdeh Oasis near Herat. It was also the time of 'The Great Game'. Britain immediately warned Russia that any further advance towards Herat would be considered as inimical to British- Indian interests.

As a consequence of the May 1879 Treaty of Gandamak after the Second Afghan War, Britain took control of Afghanistan's foreign affairs. This treaty also gave Britain control over traditional Pashtun territory west of the Indus, including Peshawar and the Khyber Pass.

After the Panjdeh incident a joint Anglo-Russian boundary commission, without any Afghan participation, fixed the Afghan border with Turkestan, which was the whole of Russian Central Asia - now Kirghizistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Thus, as a consequence of the competition between Britain and Russia, a new country, the Afghanistan we know today, was created to serve as the buffer.

In 1893, Sir Mortimer Durand, began work on delineating Afghanistan's eastern border with India. The poetess Marya Mannes wrote: "Borders are scratched across the hearts of men/ by strangers with a calm, judicious pen/ and when the borders bleed we watch with dread/ the lines of ink across the map turn red."

The cartographer's pen moved nonchalantly across the Pashtun homeland, drawing a new border disregarding history, tradition and tribal affinities. The line ran remorselessly through homes, villages, fields, common lands and grazing grounds, and dividing tribes and even families. Thus those whom God hath joined together were put asunder by man.

Sir Olaf Caroe who served in British India's NWFP from 1916 to 1934, and who was the last British governor of the NWFP in 1946-47, is also the author of The Pathans, described as the locus classicus of Pathan history. Caroe emphatically states that historically Pashtuns/Pathans and Afghans refer to the same people. The Pashtuns, who live east of the Durand Line, inhabit the mountainous areas and are made up of tribes such as the Afridis, Orakzais, Shinwaris, Bangash and Turis. West of the Khyber, in today's Afghanistan, live the Pashtuns consisting mainly of two great tribes - the Durranis, also known as Abdalis and Ghilzais.

In 1901, the British created the NWFP de-linking Pathan lands from Punjab. They further divided NWFP into settled districts that were directly administered by the British and five autonomous Tribal Agency areas ruled by local chieftains, but with British agents keeping an eye on them, as in the Indian princely states. From the very beginning the Durand Line was not an international border but a line of control (LoC). The Simon Commission Report of 1930 stated quite explicitly: "British India stopped at the boundary of the administered area."