As the India-Pakistan border opens a bit, laborers bear load

attari, india -- To say that the weight of 60 years of national rivalry and suspicion rests on Dharam Singh’s shoulders isn’t far from the truth.

Singh lives near this village barely a mile from where India and Pakistan meet. Every other day, he walks right up to the border and comes face to face with a man on the opposite side.

Hardly a word passes between them. Instead, they exchange heavy loads of buffalo meat, dried fruit and other trade items, which each man heaves onto his back or his head and carries, with a stagger or two, to a waiting truck.

Six decades of mistrust have kept trucks from crossing the divide, and provided work for about 1,300 Indian porters and hundreds of Pakistanis who shuffle back and forth through a virtual no-man’s-land loading and unloading goods.

But starting Oct. 1, many of those jobs will be in jeopardy. The Indian and Pakistani governments have agreed to allow trucks to go through the Wagah border crossing and exchange contents directly on the other side, cutting out the need for large numbers of middlemen such as Singh.

Officials hail the new arrangement as a sign of slowly improving ties between two nuclear-armed countries that have fought three wars, along with another armed conflict less than a decade ago. Critics and analysts aren’t so sure, noting that hardly any progress has been made on the most important sticking point, the fate of the Himalayan region of Kashmir.

Either way, opening Wagah’s gates to truck traffic is a bane, not a boon, for the burly porters who toil on either side, the Indians in their sweat-stained blue tunics, the Pakistanis in red.

“Our livelihoods will be done away with. Our children will die from hunger,” said Singh, 47. “We’ve been working here for 35 years. It’s the only thing we know.”

By streamlining logistics at the only land crossing between India and Pakistan, officials hope to boost a trade relationship worth less than $2 billion a year.

A handful of goods passes through Wagah: Only foodstuffs, including meat, tomatoes and onions, have been exempted from duties and are profitably transported overland. Allowing trucks to penetrate deeper inside each nation’s territory, rather than stopping them at designated loading points just inside the border, also seems a far-off prospect.

But even this small concession would have been unimaginable five years ago, when New Delhi and Islamabad nearly declared war a fourth time. A deadly terrorist attack on the Indian parliament, which India accused Pakistan of sponsoring, propelled South Asia to the brink of nuclear catastrophe.

Since then, prodded by the international community, the two sides have embarked on a rocky peace process. There have been no major breakthroughs -- only small steps often more significant symbolically than practically, such as the institution of a “friendship bus” carrying passengers through the Wagah crossing.

The decision to facilitate trade as well as travel here is not technically part of the peace negotiations. But it could not have happened without some improvement in political relations.

Whether it is much of a step forward is open to question.

“These are cosmetic actions,” said Ved Marwah, an analyst at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. “The real issue, as Pakistan says, is. . . Kashmir.”

Both countries lay claim to the region and have stationed thousands of troops there to back that up. Gunfire across the “line of control” separating Indian- and Pakistani-controlled parts of Kashmir has fallen silent, but little else about the standoff has changed.

“Things are cooler,” Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said in an interview Sunday. “The major dispute is Kashmir, and we want to resolve that with discussion, dialogue, in accordance with the wishes of the Kashmiri people. So we are treading along softly.”

Tempers flared last week when India insisted that it would go ahead with a military-organized trekking tour for civilians up to the Siachen Glacier, the world’s highest battlefield. Indian and Pakistani soldiers have faced off there since the 1980s, and although more troops have died of exposure than in battle, the peace talks have registered no progress toward a pullout.

New Delhi waved aside objections by Islamabad to the trekking tour. “The expedition is taking place in an area which is ours,” said Sitanshu Kar, a spokesman for the Indian Defense Ministry.

On the other side, the leader of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Kashmiri militant group allegedly backed by Islamabad, was quoted last week as calling for an intensification of “jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan” to “strengthen Pakistan’s defense.” Indian authorities blame the organization for deadly bombings in New Delhi in 2005 and on commuter trains in Mumbai last year.

Further constraining progress over Kashmir is the tenuous political position of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. With his popularity at an all-time low, Musharraf cannot afford to do anything that might incense both moderate and hard-line Muslims.

“He can’t reach an agreement with India that will be looked on by his supporters as a surrender to India. He can’t make any headway,” Marwah said. “It’s not that India can’t trust Musharraf, it’s that he can’t take any further step. . . . The whole process is on hold.”

None of the political wheeling and dealing means much to Mukhtiar Singh (no relation to Dharam Singh), who lives here in Attari and has worked as a border porter since his teens.

It is a hard life of piecework and low pay. For every 132-pound load Singh carries on his shoulders or his head from a truck to the border or vice versa, a distance of about half a mile, he makes 30 cents. A good day ends with $2.50 in his pocket. If no trucks show up during his shift -- two batches of porters work every other day -- he goes home with nothing.

Some porters will still be needed under the policy of allowing trucks to cross over and unload truck-to-truck. And the authorities are likely to take a go-slow approach with the new arrangement as they figure out ways to prevent the smuggling of weapons and drugs.

But many other porters will be out of a job, and Singh, 47, fears he might be one of them.

“What can a poor man do?” he said. “We can’t protest against the government. We are just laborers.”

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henry.chu@latimes.com

Times staff writer Shankhadeep Choudhury in New Delhi contributed to this report.